I feel that I am one of the biggest cheerleaders of the latest hardforks - my rewards are more than they ever have been. I have seen many prolific content creators I follow take a step back and blogging less due to the changes in the reward curve. This means less content creators and more chance of small fish like me being noticed 😁.
Manual curation projects
Since the hardfork there have been a number of manual curations projects pop up - @curangel comes to mind as one that has been successful and is always on the lookout for great content to curate.
@ocdb has been around for a while now but has made some changes to accomodate the new hardfork and is taking a more manual approach to curation.
@smartsteem was a voting bot but rather than fight the changes they have embraced them and started to manually upvote content - great work team!
A good time for new Steem users
Times are changing - before the HF it was more about 'knowing the right people'. However there has been a shift and now there are alot more users looking to curate good content. So if a new users writes good content they are more likely to get curated and want to stick around - thats good news for everyone!
Make the most of this time as soon it will become alot more crowded here and hard to earn Steem.
I've started to notice it too, there are many small authors I was upvoting because I liked their stuff are now getting rewards and my curation rewards are almost averaging a steem a day which was insane to think a few HFs ago. Still a bit of voter trading and lazy authors from auto voting but I see they're also getting flagged which shows me the new platform people aren't messing around anymore and taking steem seriously.
Yeah things are changing. Sone habits will take longer to change than others