Interesting read @mindtrap

Well, I really DO hope that we’ve reached the bottom and from now on things will get better.

It won't happen until Steemit Inc will be still dumping large amounts of STEEM on montly basis on the market :(

Major two things (for common user) that will change is:
a) non-linear reward curve - it will most likely "kill" culture of upvoting comments (time will tell).
b) 50/50 reward split - since PALnet seem to be leading in that direction we can already witness how does it really work. And so far it seem that 50/50 only create extra selling pressure, since curators are more willing to dump their easy earned PAL tokens. Can we expect different behaviour on Steemit? Why would we?

I'm full of hopes that HF21 will make things better, but right now I'm not very optimistic. I strongly believe that when it comes to PRICE steem has still long way to go (down).

Upvote on the way.
Yours, Piotr