The statistics you show what I have suspected all along: Many new accounts have been created but even more have abandoned.

When a newcomer looks at the trending page he will see all the $800 rewards and think to himself: I can do that. New to the system he won't notice that the upvotes are all from bots. Eventually he will notice. And I'll be honest to you: Those upvote bots have the smell of pyramid scheme to them. That's the moment a lot us users will stop using the system.

I use Busy which notifies me when someone follows me and I always check of there is something interesting there. But there rarely is. Almost every day a bunch of reputation 25 accounts follow me and all they post are random links to youtube videos.

Clearly bots but they too would count active as they do post. So I fear the situation is even worse.

One last idea. There are users levels on Steemit: whales, orcas, dolphins, minnows and plankton — Another interesting statistic would be the change over time here.

My prediction here would be: We hadn't had a new Whale for quite while. And even amount new Minnows are in exponential decline.