It all boils down to the user and content discovery system. Other platforms have suggested people that pop into your feed whereas here you have to go out and find people manually. You end up getting drowned out by all the spam and bot voters so nobody thinks about upvoting your posts because they either don't see them or don't think it will be worth it in terms of reward.

If they can re-do the way that content is discovered and new authors are suggested then we should see some better retention rates and more networking overall.