i made a post about the exact same thing adding some numbers and reasons as to why this is happening. Because i don't wanna post the link here i will just say a few words.
We have 1+ million accounts that from them the daily active accounts are 55-60k (from the 1 million i repeat). Now exclude some bots and double accounts that many users have and let's say that the number goes down to 40-45k.
But what it means to be a daily active account according to the statistics. It means that in a single to do either a post,comment,upvote,transaction meaning that if you use autovoting services and curation trails you are considered to be a daily active account.
That means the total number of actual active accounts that interact and generally do things manually in my opinion is around 9-10k
Even if you take the contest for example, we had around 20k of votes and the average votes per person were around 4. 20k/4= 5k of unique voters and even if you double this it's 10k as i said. Note also that this contest as you mentioned too was promoted by everyone and it was an easy way both to earn money and do the process
And we are all well aware of the fact that people do shady shit all over steemit for free votes, so I think the real number is less than 1,000 daily. It will never be a real number and many people have 20+ accounts all selling sub 0.00 votes with programs like SmartSteem and the scams like SBI, its no wonder no-one can get ahead on this site.
that's why somehow we need to find actual active users and support each other (ofc if we like the content etc etc). It's way harder in practice though cause if we follow too many our feed turns into a nightmare and with our sp we can't upvote them all :( Also with communities and discord and post promotion channels it once again becomes difficult cause it will gather too many for one person to upvote.
The best thing would be once again a community that rewards active and quality users, but then again how can you measure quality? :P you may think something a quality that i don't and vice versa. Shit it became too complicated :P
How do you think SBI is a scam? i get some upvotes from them but it's shares others gave to me, never spent a steem for that purpose and generally i get the idea but never got deep into it, so i am curious now that you mentioned it
I have bought or given a total of 14 shares, I get a .01 upvote so that means 1400 votes to earn the money back. Yet if you look at the automated accounts they have voting their people and accounts get very healthy votes every day.
Sure you get a vote and that is all some people want, votes on every post but the time it will take you to see a gain will be well after steemit is dead.
so let's hope to earn shares from others :P and only gain "profit" :P
It would be more profit if they powered up and voted me one time.
I find @qurator to be a good community which finds quality posts...