I was delighted to end up third @glenalbrethsen and don't expect to do so again if others up their game. And that's also fine with me.
Glad to hear you had a similar experience to mine regarding fewer people around posting and/or commenting, from the point of view that I wasn't imagining it.
I'm also starting to notice a marked difference in days of the week. Monday and Tuesday are by far the busiest for me. On those days I skip more posts than on others and don't have enough Steem Power to upvote all I'd like to. Then it starts to tail off.
Weekends are definitely the quietest which is good because that's also usually my busiest family time. 😊
Mondays are by far my busiest, and depending on how busy, so are my Tuesdays. There was one week a few weeks back where it took me to Wednesday to catch up. I did make it through all the posts in my feed, though. I just didn't make it out much farther than that, like I would normally.
As far as comments go, Wednesdays are generally the worst for finding things. Last week, though, it started with Monday (which is typically the best), and went through Thursday. Friday finally picked up, and then I sat and camped in the challenge30days tag for the latter part of Saturday because people stopped posting after a certain hour. :)
I haven't really noticed any patterns for finding posts to comment on @glenabrethsen. I seem to run out of time nowadays before I can start exploring new accounts.
I used to look through the new tag but it seems to be mostly spam accounts of reps lower than 30 so I've given up doing that. I haven't found anything to replace it yet.
I miss most the conversation of the people who've gone silent that I used to have a nice chat with. 😢
I think most of the people I'm currently following are still out there, they just aren't posting as much (I see them commenting here and there). The rest of you all are a part of the league, so I am trying to comment on as many of everyone's posts as I can. As you say, though, time does eventually run out, and I don't always come up with something to say.
I go to the introduceyourself tag and that's exactly what I find, too. Plus a lot of languages that I don't understand. So, not going to be very meaningful if I go and say, "Welcome to Steemit! Have fun!" to everyone if I don't have a clue as to what they're saying. Hopefully someone who does is doing that anyway.
I find it tough to really use any of the general tags, because they get used for a lot more than just the topic, and since there's five different tags people can choose from, that muddies things up some more.
I need to do a better job of getting into the tags that are specifically for a challenge or something, like dragosroua's challenge30days tag. I've had some success with the nobidbot tag, but there's only about a dozen people who use it on a regular basis and not all of those posts are things I share interest with.
That's the biggest issue, aside from finding good posts, is whether or not I have anything to say when I'm done reading the post. :)