Mmmh I see and fully understand you frustration. At least on the personal side, I am reading all posts (written in English or French) curated by STEMsocial and try to engage the authors (the lack of engagement is probably the most frustrating thing IMO). Being able to do that is however related to the fact we form a small community.
All in all, I am probably a bit more optimistic than you about the future. We will see anyways (and thanks in advance for checking my blog once in a while) :D
The funny thing is that in this useless, wrong post now already more interaction (engagement) took place than in the majority of the trendig posts. ;-)
I discussed the engagement issue with @mobbs a few weeks ago. We didn't converge on a good explanation and concluded that this was somewhat random.
My ears are burning!
Yeah but I mean, Engagement has always been an issue since early Steem days. Top trending would get a lot because it would all be either drama with Bernie or something about the blockchain. Anything regarding art or daily life was heavily under-represented. That's just the nature of blogging for money, I suppose - No way around that