There's few of us left and I remember it being tough to join and tales about many being rebuked.

It's still tough to join. When we first got started, anyone could join -- and OMG, you should have seen some of the crap I had to wade through every night. 80+ posts and most of it just dreadful!! (You can just imagine the TIME it consumed every day!! Seriously!!)

So, we put some basic standards for quality in place -- and found we were rejecting over 80% of applicants on that basis alone. (One of those "standards" was the ability to follow simple directions in submitting your membership application. Amazing how many people just couldn't seem to do that. The "killer question" seemed to be, "List 3 - 5 posts which you think are outstanding examples of your work." An astonishing number of people just couldn't be arsed to even try. We'd get answers like "All of them." So we'd look at the latest one -- and find it wasn't anything to write home about. So ... out went the "thanks-but-no-thanks" letter, and that was the end of that.)

I spent the next several months weeding out the most dismal of the bunch. (It was quite an exercise in personal growth, frankly. I don't think I'd be as timid and polite any more. If your work is crap, it's crap. And if you've made it into adulthood without learning how to write a basic sentence someone who speaks the language can understand, there's not much hope you'll improve.)

I personally tried to help two different people who I thought showed promise. Both of them wound up leaving Steemit -- fairly quickly. So, I consider that time wasted.

We do have a terrific group now. I'm proud of all of them. I also have my eye on a list of others to add sometime soon. So, you should see some new faces before long. We'll see how it goes. It makes me really proud that so many of our members made this whitelist. It seems to mean something.