Its been almost 1 year now, most days I wish I steered clear of steem and never found the place. Wasting thousands of hours of my time trying to desperately make a cent, I have never been able to. I've tried every angle and failed miserably at every turn. Every so often I give up and stop posting for a month or two hopping that when I come back that maybe things have changed for the better, but they haven't.

Plagued with shill's like @jerrybanfeild - sorry this guy has been at the forefront of every scam known to the internet and mankind in the last decade and I don't know why steem would even want to be associated with him, but they are and he makes thousands of dollars with each steem post. I guess most of us are dumb enough to fall for blue-eyes and false promises. 

Nevertheless, he is only one aspect of what is failing at steem. At one point the flow of steem and steem power was allocated over a large margin of steem users, giving way to an  equally distributed system of checks and balances. Though I wasn't making hundreds or tens of steem, after a few hours of posting I could usually make one or two. Now 10 months later, youd be hard pressed to spend the whole day just to make .2 or .3 steem. 

In turn this is mainly due to the people that @dan has left in charge of steem. People that place profits and self-serving basis in priority over the growth and sustainability of the platform. People who continue to hoard and accumulate steem, while letting the true content creators get discourage and deviate towards other platforms such as youtube. 

Whether this is intentional or not, it has yet to be determined, but as it stands, steem is on a slippery slope. As steem continues to promote the creation of more and more steem whales, through its archaic compensation schemes, the chances are that steem never be able to reach its greatest potential.   As steem continues its downward trend towards the convectional sociological structure, where .01 percent of the people, control 90 percent of the wealth, eventually it will reach a point where there is an uprising or a total collapse of the steem ecosystem. 

![steem.png](https://steemitimages.com/DQmVXYtUJyo3GKDkuo5WFzMosJ6xFKCwqTucVLDCYtQkP4q/steem.png)