I imagine part of it's that it's summer in the northern hemisphere so a lot of people have their rigs turned offline because of the heat.
Also to be a bit pedantic, it's petaFLOPS instead of FLOPS. 1 petaFLOP is 1 000 000 000 000 000 FLOPS. Anyway, I think people still know what you mean.
It's been falling since January (when we had the peak).
We have never been so low..We are now in less than a year, half of we were at some point, all graphics indicate so.
What could we do to increase people's interest?
Some of our developments that are being worked on should help.
The removal of the team requirement planned for next release should help get more users who already use BOINC to use Gridcoin.
There's been more discussion around manual rewards claim (MRC) which should allow new people to more easily start. Instead of having staking being the only way to earn rewards, you can manually claim your rewards. (with a fee compared to regular staking to still encourage staking). This should help with the retention of new users.