Hello my friend!

I have mixed feelings of the new HF. In some ways it was just an awful PR nightmare and in other ways it shows what the strengths and weaknesses are here. One of the biggest weaknesses I saw was just a sheer abysmal testing and vetting of the data before forking the platform. One of the biggest, most important things a developer does is run a mirror image test platform! It may be difficult to do to full scale but they can at least create one with a good representation of users with varying degrees of power, reputation and the like. This was obviously not the case in these developers minds.
The fork also highlighted how few people were truly involved in the process. As users we typically think that all of the witnesses have a say. I think a lot of people thought the same but alas it is not the case. Who truly has a say? I’m not sure but the witnesses that are the biggest stakes are the top 20 folks. This information led me to do what some others have done and changed our witness votes. I originally voted for several of the top 20 witnesses. I have since removed all votes from them and instead voted for witnesses in the bottom 100 until I ran out of votes. These new people are the future of the platform; some newer witnesses like @fulltimegeek are racing to the top 50; he started his node a week ago I think and he’s already at 70 last I checked because he engages with the community, he’s smart and is willing to work.
The benefits of the fork are that it cleaned up a lot of those obnoxious bots yes but it also connected more people on messaging platforms. We are all part of unique little communities here on Steemit and most of us talk only here. Since we couldn’t comment but once a day or so that comment was often used to complain and drop info for discord or telegram for us to connect offline. It would be a big loss for us here if folks like yourself stopped using the platform. It also is paving the way for future innovations here on the platform such as SMT’s which I know next to nothing about but most are excited about them. Lastly as I eluded to earlier it has led new people to dip their feet into the waters of becoming a witness. Since the fork I have seen 3 fresh witness nodes go online because people want to become more apart of the process and hope to help the platform avoid another awful failure that we just recently went through.

My opinion: this place has its troubles for sure, you can get caught up in the riff raff of negativity if you want but this place has much more to offer than others do. We have excellent communities here that other platforms don’t; we can make a little bit of money doing this and we can’t forget what drew so many of us here in the first place: to learn about the technology of the future that is blockchain. I will ride this out; I am comfortable with my position and am gaining friends, learning about all kinds of stuff daily and I earn a little bit of crypto in the process. Pretty good deal if you ask me!
Cheers.