It is a complex situation, now more than ever people need to network for their blogs to be successful. Whales do not upvote people anymore, well they only vote for those who planted themselves deep inside their asses. Before every user with decent writing skills had a chance to get upvoted. That time is now long gone, new users will have a ten fold tougher time to get noticed and will probably need to use paying services to get anything.

Steemit inc is more focused on blockchain scaling than making this a social network, they are moving everything to more of a business model with heavy work on SMTs, oracles and communities. However for anyone who didn't sold most of their SP there are many new opportunities with Steem delegations to continue with decent income.

Considering wild price swings, this is crypto, when BTC price drops every coin drops in price more. Also some exchanges like HITbtc are not legit, they freely pump the price of SBD, but nobody can deposit SBD to their exchange. Coinmarket cap takes the average price of every exchange and it seemed that SBD pumped, but that was not the case.