Getting paid to promote is unfortunately the market telling us that exposure here is, if not worth less than nothing, at least worth less the value of the vote when half of the rewards are subject to a mean locking period of 6.5 weeks. Basically the free market is telling us that our platform sucks and exposure on here isn't worth shit.

I believe the main reason was the broken economy which the last hardfork attempted to fix. I'm optimistic that it will be at least partially successful. There are other reasons too of course, but having an economic system that punished honest voting was the chief culprit imo, and hopefully this less so the case.