@thekittygirl,

Late last night, I responded to @blockurator's comment without reading your post. This morning I read it and wanted to add a few insights.

You are a pro. So am I and so is Block. As such, we have standards to which we hold ourselves. We WILL NOT produce crap just because we are massively under-compensated for creating quality.

And we are not alone. There are many others who wish to do the same. We believe that Merit, not Manipulation, ought to be the metric that determines a post's success or failure and are willing to accept the collective judgement of our respective audiences as the arbiter of whether such standard has been achieved.

That is our Game.

To others, STEEM/Steemit is just a big cash cow to be milked in any way they can dream up. Quality of Content is of no relevance whatsoever. So long as people keep posting, a necessary facade is maintained and coins keep getting produced ... coins which accumulate in their pockets despite their having done nothing to earn them. So long as the enablers keep enabling, who cares if they're miserable?

This is their Game.

The two games cannot peaceably co-exist. Sooner or later, the former group will rebel. First will come contempt, then disgust. A some point they will reach a tipping point, a critical mass. And that's when the wheels will come off the bus.

I have written endlessly warning about the consequences of the endless cheating and self-dealing. I will write no more.

In the end, all this comes down to one simple dynamic: A bunch of self-aggrandizing Millennials refused to listen to old men about how to wage war, and to old woman about how to keep the peace. The sociability that underpins social networks is older than Man. It is subject to Rules and one of the most important among them is that salutes are not purchased, they're earned. What the kids could not, and cannot, grasp is that our collective endeavor was never about computer code ...it was about genetic code.

HardFork 21 will be STEEM/Steemit's Funeral Pyre, the final conflagration of the dead (or nearly so).

Perhaps poetically, the Whales will become Minnows. Us Minnows will lick our wounds ... and re-form somewhere else. Sooner or later, a Meritocracy will develop and the Rules than govern human conduct will re-assert themselves. And perhaps more poetically still, the children will take their rightful place in the pecking order ... working FOR those with gray hair.

Quill