When I joined Steemit 6 months ago, the main development blog by @steemitblog was just writing about the successes of Hardfork 19 (HF 19). The new HF 20 codenamed Velocity was proposed to the Steemit community in order to increase the rate at which new accounts would be created on Steemit, along with many other benefits such as removing the vote dust threshold, and so on. In fact, here's an excerpt from that blog.

"Steem Velocity is going to be key to bringing millions of users to the Steem ecosystem. Communities and our mobile application are on their way. Development is proceeding well and 0.20.0 will be paramount to getting us prepared for those launches and opening the floodgates for the millions of new users that will get to experience Steem in the next year. We are as devoted as ever to the vision of Steem and are excited that we can continue to partner with you, the community, to make Steem as great as it can be."

That post which can be found |Here| is now over 10 months old and no further updates to my knowledge have been introduced since.

(Img Source: Pixabay)

Steemit is now over two years old, and even though I've had the pleasure of joining over 6 months ago, there's a few fundamental issues that I'd like to address regarding Steemit in general.

The first has to do with how difficult it has become to find information regarding anything about the Steemit blog. In the beginning, most Steemit developers would create posts that could be found on the trending tab - a place where Steemit users could read viable information about the development of this platform in real time. During those times, finding important information was as easy as clicking one button.

However, this all changed as Steemit grew not only with an influx of new users, but with an influx of voting bots as well. As it stands, looking at Alexa website rankings, Steemit is in the top 1500 of all worldwide websites - which means that a vast influx of new users has joined this website.

(Img Source: Alexa Rankings)

About 4-5 months ago, I started realizing that voting bots were becoming more and more common among the Steemit community. At first, there were a few major players, but that soon grew ten-fold. With this, more users started using large amounts of SBD to place their posts into the trending tab, making it harder for Steemit development news to be found.

What I'm trying to get at is that there needs to be a better way to distinguish updates to this platform rather than Steemit users having to individually go to these profiles to learn what's going on. A new system needs to be implemented where developers have some sort of distinguishing symbol or their posts have their own developer tab. This would make it easier for users such as myself to understand what is happening with the platform. At the very least, these important updates should be stickied or posted in the trending tabs for all to see.

Steemit has changed from a place where users would manually curate to a vote bot heaven. I'll admit that I consistently use these vote bots because the sad reality is that the vast majority of users don't curate any longer, but instead sell their votes to these vote bots. The fact is that this really hurts the Steemit ecosystem. Speaking from my personal experience, even when using vote bots to reach the hot or trending section, I don't receive many comments or even upvotes for my work. Now, I know that my work isn't the greatest, but I see similar things on many other users posts.

In my opinion, I feel as if in the future this place will be ran on vote bots and even though there are more than a million Steemit accounts created, mostly everyone will be selling their SP for votes / delegations and this place will become a place that shies away from manual curation and will rely on automation - leaving Steemit to become a ghost town devoid of any human interaction. I speak of this because it is the prevalent course of action being taken here. I see new users struggling to make any meaningful connections, let alone any money on here. In fact, as Steem value rises, the pending payouts in SP drop dramatically.

Today, a $100 payout roughly pays 12-13SP. However, this is not always going to be the case. As Steem rises from $4 to $8, this value will decrease dramatically. The rewards system in my opinion is currently broken as it does not take into account the massive influx of users and the increasing price of Steem in the next few years. However, that is a topic for another time.

The reason I ask what happened to Hardfork 0.20.0 is because I'm genuinely interested. I haven't heard any updates within the last 6 months and if I did miss something, I'd love to know. I'd love to know how the Steemit ecosystem will change when we have 5 million, 10 million, or even 25 million users. Will there be benefits to manually curating or will everyone keep on selling their votes for profit?

Steemit has come a long way in 2 years, and I'm excited to see what this place has in store for all of us in the near future.