Congrats on the milestone dude. I'm a bit late to the comment party as I was AFK the last 3 days.
Ha ha, it was great meeting you too m8, both here in Liverpool that first time and at SF in Krakow.
It has been a wild hive ride from the olden days of 'the chain that none shall mention'... ooops 🤣 and many have dropped off the map for sure. But ya know, it has always been about the quality of content on here for me - and I don't mean just my own content 😂 - and that is the biggest sadness that I see in many of the content creator who have left, many of them created quality content. Which kinda ties into the subject of rewards you have mentioned on this post. I think that many of those people left because they often didn't/couldn't earn even a fraction of what their posts were worth, even if you nail it down to a dollar/hour value model. But, well... these types of discussion have flogged the proverbial dead horse.
As someone has mentioned already in the comment thread, perhaps with an alt season that includes a meaningful increase of value in the hive token (which might happen soon if the continuous down trend in hive/btc value flips) then many might return, along with a whole host of new creative people turning up to add content (which is the real value of this network IMO) to the hive 🙂
I still see plenty of decent content on hive though, and many use it more like a social network (commenting more than posting) than a blog site, which is fine. 
Keep on keeping on buddy 👍
RE: A BUTT’S MILESTONE :2000 Followers