Wonderful post! Sorry to hear you were locked out of your account during the hack.

" am I the only one who had higher hopes for this platform to become something game-changing and revolutionary - a socio-economic catalyst transforming the nature of social media"
This. 100 times this. I have been everywhere from beginning of reddit, 9gag, funnyjunk, voat, etc and this is the first time I am so excited about a new one popping up and showing more promise than anything ever has before. Not that I had invested in any of the previous ones, and I doubt most people even had the possibility too. Steemit makes everything possible, and I am 100% that no matter how long it will take for mass adoption, with bigger userbase and more balanced voter-value in time it will all become golden.
Not to mention Steem can do so much more than just being a social platform, it can do what augur (crowdvoting) and any marketplaces and many other apps that are being developed by the Ethereum team.

Usually I liked to compare eth and btc to Apple and Microsoft, now its more like btc being Internet Explorer, eth being firefox and Steem being the beta version of google chrome.

I have been into altcoins for some time, and have been promoting Steemit on my instagram: www.instagram.com/crypt0trader and the userbase is growing there every day too! Would love it if you could take a look at my post: https://steemit.com/steemit/@getssidetracked/the-steemit-community-on-instagram-is-growing
where I warn people about suspicious activity from user: steemit on Instagram, and to make sure not more users get their accounts hacked/phished

Thanks for this blogpost! I also want to take the time to mention not to forget the comment sections of posts! If there is anything I've learned on reddit its that the comments can be a place of originality and most unique stuff you could read, most times leading to them being of more quality than the uploaded content, and that's the real beauty of quality reading!