I'm not sure what is going on but I have noticed a drop off in both interest and payouts on my posts as well. I have a few suspicions though.

The first is that SBD is sky high right now and it has been for several days.

Source
I even made a post about it because I am confused. I thought that SBD was supposed to track the USD so how is it possible for it to be elevated for days? Aren't there mechanisms to correct this? I thought SBD were for internal Steemit use only but apparently they are on Bittrex and other exchanges.

Anyway what I am wondering is if the dollar amount listed for the post or comment is in USD or Steem Dollars because SBD isn't doing what they are supposed to do right now. If the payout is in Steem Dollars then you can multiply the payout by 1.6.

The other thing I think happened is that STEEM has been very stagnant compared to other cryptocurrency the last couple of months (not including today). Many of my other holdings are up by 50-100% in a couple weeks.

I think a lot of the people that were active a month ago just aren't interested right now. A lot of the people that used to vote on my content are not posting as much as they used to or doing as much curation I'm just not seeing it. I hate to say this but as much as most of us would like to think otherwise the majority of Steemians are here for the money and when they think they can make more money trading or doing something else they are going to lose interest in Curation. Why spend hours to make a couple bucks curating when you can make a couple hundred dollars on a quick trade?

Hopefully this is just a short term blip and doesn't turn into a long term trend. Things do tend to go in cycles and if the crypto market stabilizes and trading opportunities dry up people will be looking for more small consistent gains again.