Hello, I hope you are very well. When I started steemit in 2018, its native currency steem had a fairly high value of $8 per steem, but at that time receiving a vote in favor was difficult since there was a monopoly where the bots Bidding was the ones that dominated everything, the best known Bot was @upme, I don't know what relationship it currently has with @upvu but the names coincide a bit.
I continue at that time there was a war because a certain @berniesanders used to publish a simple letter and he gave himself a vote of 50 steem and even managed to reach 300 steem per publication since he had great voting power at that time with his multiple accounts . I don't know if Bernie did it out of hate or simply to show his power on the platform, but I'm sure they put together a squad where they dedicated themselves to downvoting each of their posts and obviously Sanders' response was the same .
At that time I met a great writer like @krnel, his posts used to be very long but he was one of the users who supported his followers and even more so if you made an excellent comment. Another writer that I liked a lot at the time and was a great partner in my life was @willymac as a writer he had all the skills he is or was a complete writer with a great language of expression. Currently I lost communication with him a couple of years ago.
I do not remember very well if at that time there were as many communities as there are currently, since at that time the labels were the key to be seen by other users who said they supported said label, of course after justin took over steemit and after From the fork many things changed, I am still exploring the new and improved steemit to give a detail of how the platform has evolved after my absence.
After many migrated to hive, the bid bots left steemit having a clean bot platform but this has returned little by little I hope the story of 2018 does not repeat itself.
Currently there are more users than normal than in 2018 back then the good writers were counted on the fingers of the hand and the trend zone was a surreal zone where users with enough capital to pay the bots dominated the trend zone . Currently it is something similar with the difference that the publications are being helped by a bot that offers voting by proxy, something that in the past was the opposite, we had to pay to receive votes.