I've been here since June and have seen a marked decline in the quality and overall experience on Steemit since I started here. The first 2 weeks when I was the least familiar with the platform were the best 2 weeks of my experience. Since then, there have been a few forks (soft & hard) and the quality of content has declined at about the same rate that the quantity of bots has increased.

It's actually very interesting to know that many of the bots joined around the same time that I joined. It's possible that nefarious individuals saw the same advertising for Steemit as I did, and they began their plans for exploiting the rewards pool for monetary gains only, as opposed to the original purpose of Steemit, which was to be the "new Facebook", but with rewards going to the users as opposed to the advertisers.

I also have a strange feeling that the increased latency we're experiencing on the Steemit page is due to the roll out of SMTs on the Steem blockchain, and the Steem blockchain not being able to support the bandwidth required for all of these additional transactions.