I don't think there is necessarily anything wrong with the user stats.

So what if people complain the usage is down compared to the peak of the bull market? Weak hands be weak hands.

The decline in the use of Steem has stopped. It's all tied to the price of Bitcoin and Bitcoin is in a bull market again. STEEM will follow suit with the rest of the altcoin market. People forget how extraordinarily volatile STEEM is. If you look at the price history on Coinmarketcap, there have been two extremely violent pumps followed by equally violent crashes. I'm talkin' > x100 up followed by x60 down. In dollar terms, the long term trend of STEEM seems to be up. Bitcoin has gone up faster but that can be expected.

I think STEEM will continue to suffer from the bad rap the ninja mining and the vote selling, Dan Larrimer leaving and all that shit gave it. But at some point the fact that Steem's tech is ideally suited for what it was built for will help it regain one of the top spots. I mean, on EOS you need a ton of RAM to get an app even off the ground. On Ethereum every little thing you do as a user costs money. That shit is dead in the water.

The crypto space as a whole is full of scams and cons and self-maximizing scumbags. When Steem was launched, a number of those found their way to it. The nature of Steem is to make everything transparent. Of course such a platform would get a bad rap because so many of the early adopters were scum, not a majority, but a very visible minority.