It is aided by the fact that we saw a change in the reward curve that made it more sensible to reward comments with upvotes. Also, there is no dust on Leofinance which enables a payout on even the smallest of upvotes (in LEO, HIVE is still dusted).

Yup. I have no doubt that LEO will be able to get new users to try out the platform. The question is retention. Getting people to stay engaged daily with comments definitely helps. I would love it if Hive would copy LEO in regards to the curation rules. The whole time of upvote affecting curation rewards on Hive is so unfair to manual curators. It also adds needless complexity when you have to explain it to newbies.