I would suspect... although there's no way to develop an actual metric to measure it... that the majority of people who used to be here and then left were also people whose primary motivation for being here was "be on Steemit/Steem/Hive and make money!"

I'm still here, but I never came here to "make money." In fact, it was a total surprise to me when I actually did make a few dollars. My "expectation" was to have a secure and ongoing place to park my content... saying that as someone whose journey of creating web content has included close to 50 venues where there was suddenly a blank page where there used to be content, when the doors were suddenly shut.

So my primary "value" here is continuity. That's not most people's value.

My secondary value is using this (hopefully) as a sort of very long term savings account that just slowly builds and is otherwise left alone. If we get lucky, maybe the Hive token will rise in value. Who knows. Don't have any more or less faith in that than I would have if investing in the stock of a company I happen to like. Hopes, perhaps, but no expectations.