I'm mostly here for the community and the potential to become fully sustainable doing the things I love, no need for deals with the devil or "selling myself".
I was looking for somewhere to share my writing and there is shit for community over at patreon. I thought, "why the hell doesn't this place have a forum, somewhere to connect to other content creators and potential readers". Then steemit appeared and it was just so easy to see why I belong here.
I stick around because despite the problems, there are too many awesome people here and we are incentivized to interact with each other. I want to see a ton of people who want more than just their own profit to be able to focus all their energy on what they do and steemit has that potential. How many people can achieve a high degree of self sustainability....I guess that depends on the way steemit evolves...