Are we back to the chain?

Jesus fucking Christ...

Steem never really worked for me much as a blog. I did incredibly well with writing stories on here at various times, and a few times with science and technology content, but I never really thought it worked that well in the way I thought it was intended. I know quite a few people on here and talk to them occasionally, but then occasionally I'd make a post and it really felt like crickets.

Except now.

VERY oddly enough, now it feels like Steem is actually the way it should be. At least for me. Everyone left for that certain other fork, so there are far less posts. Now I see upvotes from people I haven't talked to much in over a year. It's so weird.

It feels like the people left has really shrunk, back into the core community.

I don't think that I deserve some great upvote amount on Steem. Steem has actually taught me how entitled I feel sometimes. I'm actually ecstatic when I receive a bit more than a dollar on something like a short story. But I actually really do appreciate manual upvotes.

From the second I got here and actually understood how things worked, I didn't want auto-votes. I thought it was a horrible concept. Here you are pouring your life into the blockchain hoping for recognition, and all you got is a few auto-votes. It makes me wanna cry just thinking about it.

But then I toiled on the chain for months, and years, and often times it felt like I was just shouting into the void...or typing rather. Then I started to kinda want those auto-votes, because I had poured so much in.

I guess I probably stumbled a bit. Probably will again if I feel like it. While there is a lot of greed on the chain, there are also very legitimate reasons to want that money. And who's to say whether or not someone deserves it who toils out biblical proportions of literature on our digital domain of blockchain. I judge less on it these days.

For quite a while there it felt like a large portion of the chain probably had to commit questionable acts to ensure income from their efforts. But now...now oddly enough we're getting manual votes. 5, 10, 20 cents sometimes. God damn that's digital gold.

It's a hell of a lot for me anyway.

There were times when I felt like no one was even reading my posts. I'd occasionally get a few small upvotes, but often limited interaction, and mostly just automation. I'd ask questions of the chain and they'd go unanswered. Now, it feels like it's back to normal.

Now here's a question that may just draw ire from the chain: Was Justin Sun just what we needed?

Now we suddenly got a fork of the chain promising actual open source development, and people on both chains manually voting and interacting again. Not just on a few whales posts, but all over. It feels like it's almost back to Steem again. We just happen to have a massive dick-tator at the head that we have to work around. But could this bring us back?

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