Hey buddy, great post. Steemit is fucking dead and crypto is dead with it. I can definitely relate to you in the sense that this crash has come at the worst time. It feels as if in Entrepreneurship when it rains it pours, when the world shits on your head it doesn't just drop a turd, it diahreas all the fuck over you.

I recently sold/walked away from my business planning on doing passion projects and justhustling. I also knew that I had some crypto I could sell off if I needed some funds. Well as soon as I left one of my income sources Amazon Merch wound up getting fucked with by fake trademark claims so that took my $1100 from that down to about $200 a month. Crypto which was at like 6k or 7k fell to where its at now. Several of the affiliate programs I had bringing in $300 to $600 per month either stopped paying out, changed terms, shutdown the programs. Youtube earnings are down. When it rains it pours, trying to keep a positive mindset and keep hustling.

As for Steemit its clear the creators havn't given a shit about this place for a longtime. most of the creators I follow have left or post infrequently. I agree with what you said about both ads and paying content creators. Most of the contenthere is shit and the search function, hot and trending tabs are fucking terrible so they don't allow you to find the few gems on here. The content is way too centric on crypto and steemit, not gonna get the mainstream populace to come her e for this type of content.

I think in a sense we as a community here think were better than something like buzzfeed, were above stupid articles and clickbaity titles but honestly that's what brings the massses and that's what brings money.

We also need advertisers because advertisers actually bring real money to the platform, without advertisers this is simply everyone trying to extract money from the platform myself included and the only way for anyone to make money or to keep the price up is to find a greater fool to buy this shit.

As for crypto I can't say crypto is dead because crypto has surprised me many times before. Things can turn around in the snap of a fingers in crypto. That said even myself a former crypto fanboy, bitcoin is going to 100k type dude, I don't see anything happening.

Crypto is an amazing revolutionary technology but the reality is the best technology or best solution doesn't always win out, soemtimes the best marketing wins out over the best product. Bitcoin and crypto and allowing anyone to have a bank in their pocket without third party intermediaries is a fantastic idea. That said most people don't really need the anonymity or freedom that crypto offers. It was great for buying weed off agora but when I buy an XBox 360 I don't really give a shit who knows or if a banks in the middle of that transaction and for many people they already have a credit card, it gives them rewards, its easy and convenient to use, it may even give them a free warranty on the xbox so why would I use crypto which is more difficult to use, isn't my normal behavior, does't have rewards, doesn't have chargeback protection. There's just very little reason for your average person to start using crypto. Maybe if you're from Venezuela or operating in a black market space but outside of that crypto just isn't needed by most people. Ive heard for a new technology to take off it has to be 10x as good as the previous. Crypto is amazing but your average credit card user isn't gonna switch over.

I also think the timing of the run to 20k was terrible, not that anyone had any control over that. The vast majority of people who got into crypto got in towards the end of 2017. So say 100 miillion people are involved in crypto. Maybe what 20 million of them are early adopters and got in cheap and 80 million of them got in at the peak. That 80% of crypto users has a bad taste in their mouth from crypto, they lost money, heck maybe they even got involved in some ponzi scheme shit like bitconnect or lazer and they further associate crypto with bullshit.

Even people who didn't get involved in crypto saw from the sidelines and news media what happenned. In order for crypto prices to go up we need greater fools to buy it and I don't think we have any fools left.