Unfortunately, this report neglects certain facts that are centrally important in the retention - or, rather the failure to retain - users. After April, 2017, I am tens of thousands of others joined the platform, excited by the prospect of free speech on social media on a platform where the posters of content were rewarded directly by the consumers of that content, and the prospect of eliminating the abusive advertising model that poisons media to this day.

Downvoting creators' every post and comment drove almost all of them off the platform. The governance of Steem, and now Hive, is solely determined by weight of the votes for witnesses. By controlling the witnesses, the voters that install them in the top 20 control the code they run. Since then ~36 whales (presently 43 whales, last I checked) with just over 50% of the stake have consistently attained >90% of rewards from the pool. Dispersing stake to a larger population of users decentralizes governance and threatens the nearly total capture of inflation issuing from the rewards pool.

During 2017 many influencers with thousands of followers joined the platform, initially received valuable upvotes while they began to market the platform to their followers, and then were suddenly completely demonetized by DV'ing every post and comment to $0. A variety of lame excuses were given, but what resulted was the capture of their investments in tokens by the whales, and similar milking of the followers they brought to the platform, and the ~36 whales that had mostly mined their tokens retained their majority of VP electing the top 20 witnesses.

This practice of DV'ing creators 100% of their rewards on every post and comment continues to this day, and the whales maintain their control of the code that controlling the top 20 witnesses avails them. Add to that the hemorrhage of funds from the DHF that is similarly controlled by whales whom control >50% of the stake that can vote for proposals, and the platform is just a faucet from the perspective of the whales that control governance.

The Stewards of Gondor was an experiment in which modest delegation of ~5k tokens were made to a few dozen curators. When some were discovered to be self voting or otherwise defrauding the program, their delegations were withdrawn, and little or no loss of underlying funding occurred. As you point out, new users whom were upvoted tended to post more and stay longer, and the program was wildly successful. What followed was a flagwar in which the funder of the program was driven from the platform.

The promise and potential of the platform has been hijacked by it's plutocratic governance model that enables ~36 whales to extract the vast majority of tokens. Until and unless that changes, the platform will continue to be mined by the whales, and users will continue to be driven from the platform so they can maintain their 100% control of the top 20 witnesses by possessing >50% of the stake. >1m users have undertaken to join and begin posting and almost all of them have been driven off so the whales can maintain their lock on governance and the flow of inflation from the pool. All sorts of excuses and justifications have been put forward to cover for this avarice, but the bottom line remains their profit that results from controlling governance.

Thanks!