I am sure you are not delighted to no longer be able to deploy @buildawhale, but I hope you are able to personally interact with folks more now, and find that more personally rewarding, if less so financially.
I actually engage quite a bit, on a slow day I make 4 comments, and on a busy one 51.
I'm sure this is a trying time for you, and I am glad to see you are as sanguine and accepting of this turn of events as you could be.
Not at all, I think hf21 has given Steem a chance to survive, the path it was on was doomed to fail. As I said many times in the past, I rather have no bid bots, but I do believe in promotion, every platform has it. When I was new it was impossible to be seen and many times I just wanted to quit.
I always felt if there was going to be bid bots, Steem is better if I run one. The SP I had was going to be used for a bid bot regardless if I did it or not. I put a lot of effort in running @buildawhale more ethically than others. I prevented a lot of garbage from being rewarded with my blacklist and spent over a year doing daily curation digests showcasing the best content that used my service. These both cost me a lot of time and money which no other bot chose to incur.
It wasn't perfect, even hf21 isn't perfect.
See? We are perfectly in agreement.
Ok, so maybe not, but I didn't come here to disagree with you. I 'spose I just can't help it. I'm apparently disagreeable. I'm sure we can agree on that.