It looks like Steemit has caught a kind of depression, which is probably caused by natural law after the high in January/February.

It all depends on how you look at your delegation: Was it an investment that paid off for you and brought you relevant profit in the past (in the form of money or recognition)?

Then you could get over the current slump and classify it as a past investment. I made a high "profit" for myself for a while when everyone was doing well here and the euphoria was blossoming.

Now that I have some unusually small voted articles, it feels like a punishment and a lack of interest in general. Furthermore, one thing is quite unclear: Why, for example, one is supported by a patron or several for a while and one has got used to a beautiful cushion and then, all of a sudden, this reconciliation stops.

It is offering oneself in a very open and sometimes inscrutable market, where nothing is binding. As long as you don't belong to a community that occupies the niches here and that you join in order not to roam as a single wanderer, everything falls under the category of competition and survival alone.

Even under the umbrella of a community one is not subject to any binding order except the personal ethics of the individual members. This uncertainty is really very hard to endure because people don't like to move in an unpredictable space.

For the security factors one makes a contract in the world out there. There is no such thing here. There's such a thing as developing a sense of when to serve a community and get a lot back from it, so it's moral honor to give what you receive. Inside and outside, it's hard to stick to the code of honor when you see how many violate it. Well. That's another topic.

What makes it difficult for you to know if what you're doing is of value is the comments (since a high vote here is nothing special without a corresponding comment commitment). Are you only praised by your readership because they hope in return that they will get your follower-ship or a higher vote than 1 cent from you? Here again: a high uncertainty factor. The comment field is extremely important and is always underestimated.

Basically, you might have a handful of active readers when it comes up who really want to get what you offer or consciously perceive and give you valuable feedback.

It's basically a pretty untenable state of affairs and I think big players and their preferred content producers should indeed enter into some kind of contract with each other, with at least the time dimension clarified and you know when one payment will expire so you can take care of the next. Otherwise, losing a supporter hits you hard and unprepared.

But I would only look at it that way if you want to live off it. If you're not dependent on steemit as the main source of income for your livelihood, then this is the Zen field where you get to know your ego damn well.