This was a fantastic rant.  Fantastic.  Thank you... it mirrors my thoughts in many ways... I am not quite so jaded yet... yet.

It's a rich irony to have the word decentralized built into the most censored site on the net.

>This place will never get any better, mark my words.

This may be true but I'm not ready to throw in the towel just yet.

I can empathize with you 100%. One thing that @liberosist said in another post resonates with me and I think it lays out the crux of the issue but it could be further expounded to include the drivel that is promoted by manipulators.

>Scammers and criminals have an inherent advantage over altruistic, peaceful people.

I've seen comment scammer make a killing and more often then not they are not stopped. I've seen people systematically bid bot lackadaisical posts and walk away with rewards and reputation. Honest people often get left in the dust. It's just the way it is or seems to be currently.

Those of us that want to see thoughtful, articulate and meaningful material on the blockchain are often dismayed when we see repetitive garbage be receive inordinate rewards through inorganic or circular voting.

Perhaps, if after a few months, if the community fails to stop the rampant manipulation from individuals like haejin, tradewonk, and many more like them, I too will need to take an extended leave of absence. 

On the flipside, there are a lot of awesome people I have come in contact with so it's been a mixed bag.

Hope you are able to become refreshed and maybe come back to a cleaned up Steem. I am but a minnow but I have big ambitions to implement controls to deter the junk posting. We need flags and more of them.

I think some of the problem might be that you are scrolling the trending page. I go through new posts and sometimes hot posts and I am always finding gems. The platform is what the people make it with every interaction.  So I think if Steemit sucks it is probably because people just suck. Lol. 

I am an artist, and Steemit has already been very valuable to me in my few months of use as far as building relationships with interesting people, learning, and even being able to upgrade my equipment and supplies.

I hear you and I'm glad, that you are giving your anger a voice. I'm here for exactly posts like yours - this is what I really want to read - it's real and it matters.
Yes, I'm also here for money, but over the past weeks I got in touch with people here and developed deeper connections than ever before on Facebook. There is a lot of gold hidden in a huge pile of shit. At the moment, I am able to find this gold very easily - this somehow gives "mining" another meaning... 
I think losing you as a free and clear voice of the community does hurt and I hope, you will return soon....

Here have my cent, I'm sure there's more meaningful discusions happening on facebook.

I am only here for two months, so what do I know? I get your irritation, I only agree with half of it. I see very good artists leave after a few days, I see battles about rewards and a lot nonsens I don't care about. But you know what? I see the same in the real world, and there it irritates me even more.

The other half is why I stay. Here I have a possibility to earn some money, I have found interesting people who share their knowledge, I have interesting conversations with them. I almost never look in trending, I find interesting people mostly in comments of people I already follow or in new.

I hate the begging and the spam, but even that is easy to find in real life. 

I am sorry that you will be leaving but i understand. Being that frustrated isn't a situation you want to stay in.

As a relative newcomer, I am only just starting to see the problems that you are describing. I thought this would a nirvana compared to Facebook. In comparison, it is, but there are structural problems that if not addressed will turn this into a shadow of what this could have been. I am still naively hopeful that this will change though...

So you found that 99% of people are dump, but still try to "appeal" your retarted friends, and feel bad that you are superior to everyone else. I don't know what content have you made by I am upping the game on my other channel @steemilicious

I haven’t been on platform long but I would say the conundrum is that you lure people here with promise of money, but then all the content becomes money oriented, not quality oriented. The fake positivity is the biggest thing I take issue with. It’s so hard as a noob to get your rep up, but then if you say something someone doesn’t like, you get flagged and can lose a lot of its a higher rep person. If they tweaked it to where there is less penalty for flags financially but maybe it could limit number of posts instead, we would get more real around here. The spammers with their “nice post, you make world better place reading your content, pls upvote”  that just spam everywhere is soooo annoying. I’m still trying to find good content, I have found some, but it’s been harder to find more.

Well your post hit home right between my eyeballs and dead center into my brain... spot on imo... I wrote what follows below months ago but have backed away a few weeks later...and still not wanting to jump back in...your post  amplified many  points..Good luck and hopefully you will return (you should)!

<sup>I was lucky 44 days ago when I finally jumped after looking at Steemit from the cheap seats and whether or not I should. I can say as a plankton, all you said is so true. @blank a good intelligent poster from Thailand (Brit x-pat) was the first to pass on some advice and he followed (I think out of pity). The early days were just engage others blogs, avoid being trite and be yourself but if you had nothing to add..don't and vote + even its worth so little if you felt moved by the post's content. The author takes note and appreciates it. It is common decency/good manners. Then you evolve meet new people - purely by happenstance. @blank is another I am quite fond of. Because of him I read something by @blank .. that led to something I could not have imagined would have occurred in any other SM medium. Great guy! Separate the wheat and caff and they are some extraordinary people/content on Steemit. Yes I noticed some gambits, whining and the ever-rising amount of new accounts inbound, my bandwidth is throttled to nothing in prime-time of late and such - BUT I GET IT. I hope to earn my place here not by silliness or fraud but by consistent engagement and I don't expect anything for nothing... only for value as viewed by others.</sup>

## This place doesn't suck, it is just like a knife. If you use it to stab and hurt people it is a bad thing but if you use it to cut food it is good. You don't go into a home and stick your nose into its cesspool and judge the place as a cesspool and is full of shit. #steemit is a place for kind-hearted people to show love and care for other people in a flash unlike in FB or other social media where you will die before you get a buck or never.

Well, that was depressing. But I know what you mean, I only joined a couple weeks ago and everything you pointed out is blatantly obvious, to anyone who isn't blind.  Hopefully there can be some implementations in the future that can make steemit great again but I dunno I'm just a n00b.

You've been cashing out a few hundred bucks per week from here.  I'm eager to see how long this extended break lasts.

I never look at the trending page. I follow people that post content I like. If you only look at your feed things start to look a lot better. I find new people to follow through resteems and occasionally searching recent posts for certain keywords. In any social network with hundreds of thousands of people or more you are going to have a pretty low signal to noise ratio. Steemit is no different in that regard.

You’ll be back, faggot. You’ve been banned everywhere else, and you can’t stand being alone. Go make your own feed and stop looking for hand outs like a welfare recipient.

I agree with you in most of what you said but personally i never look trending page ..i look only at my feed and I try to keep that people whose content seems interesting to me..
I like your sense of criticism @schattenjaeger

Man sucks to see you go, these feeling are all around to everyone with compassion on this platform. I may agree that it's failed. I will stay until communities come. Upvoting the posts that deserve it, trying to keep around the good content creators before they all leave and its just us investors, and the voting bots left.

Hope to see you back someday. You are one of the good ones. Stay safe, and best of luck yo

I totally understand you. For me steemit was much more fun when I was part of a community.

Yeah, steemit is  not perfect in any way, but with all the things that are being added to it (Dtube, memes, SMTs, whatever) I do see it's future. 

But why would you leave? You can start cleaning up this shithole - for example flagging those idiots who didn't even read your post. Nothing will change if people will be scared of flagging someone who do deserve it.