I almost left during the bid not era, a good 80% of my friends did, but there were a bunch of us who just kept hanging out at discord and ended up curating for OCD and they told us when things started getting better. I think the longest I spend away was 3 months, but there was an 8 month period where the quality of my posts dropped a lot cause no one was engaging.
Mid 2017 when I started was fantastic, bad rewards distribution but soooo many awesome people, like now but 20x more in numbers. The better reward distribution is vital to make it sustainable though. I think we'd be a million strong now if the Great Flood of bidbots didn't occur. It's ok. We will repopulate.
Ah... so you are not new, and I had my hopes up that someone could be new and actually write. Well.., it's better than not having you here at all. Welcome back!
I'm not new, but my main reason for starting a youtube channel is that I figured if I was putting stuff up at 3speak, I might as well try to fish a few new hivesters out by putting stuff out on youtube, and maybe a few readers for my novel too. Everything comes back to Hive, after the bid bots were defeated and as soon as we split, that's when I bought in big with my old account and became a real believer in the future of this project.