I never really understood the need to have two different tokens but since that is what we are facing then we just need to adjust.
I always use steem.supply and check on the STU instead of the dollar value because the SBD not being pegged at 1 is making it difficult.
Now steeminc has no control now in SBD and with the rewards in SBDs and bot payment can be done in SBD it drives the market to want higher value for sbd.
the point of sbd was to have a stable currency pegged at 1usd, but it apparently wasn't thought through effectively.
Yeah and the trading and speculation of the SBD caused it to balloon which was both a boon and a bane because people joined because of the inflated value of posts but the bad thing was we got spammers and plagiarist and not to mention phishing scammers who tried to take advantage of things.
When SBD and Steem fell a lot of these quick rich minded people stopped posting and now that it is picking up again we are seeing activity again from these people.
I think activity increases in general when payouts are higher. As soon as people can make more money here from posting than they can from their other activities, they post more.