Been gone for 2 years. What happened?

Just happened to visit Steemit.com today and saw that it was being hard-forked. Awesome.

I haven't been paying a lot of attention and have only visited Steemit sporadically to see what had changed during my 2 years off. The lack of obvious updates to Steem and the Steemit UI turned me off. It also felt like more of a cash cow than a real platform that was looking to expand and grow.

I also saw them admit to censoring posts on Hive, which is the reason I came here in the first place. You guys are right, it's great marketing for Hive. Meanwhile, the UI updates I see here on Hive are already an improvement over what I've seen there.

I am curious what caused the hard fork to actually happen, as I've been totally out of the loop - my visits to Steemit were only surface-level and I didn't look much at the "news" or "updates" that were put out, because it didn't seem like anything had actually changed. (Maybe that was it, just lack of updates? I also saw something to do with the Steem branding?)

Anyway, if someone could summarize or point me to the reasons why this is happening, I'd love to see them. Thanks all!