While I have not been as active as most of you on Steemit in either this or my previous accounts that got locked 
I joined Empire Avenue (now called Empire Kred) nearly 6 years ago. I have probably been the heaviest user of the site.
I have also been a heavy and extremely successful user of places such as TSU, Empeopled, Google+, Scoopit, Triberr all of which have user visit graphs even worse than EK and Steemit.
Steemit has 120,000 accounts and Empire Kred has over 100,000 as well. They were both revolutionary and disruptive and both had massive early success. They have both attracted some extremely talented and passionate content creators. They are both I believe "rescuable" but it will require MLM. Plus starting again in regards to the slope of the playing field.
Empire Kred and Steemit both heavily reward the early joiners and while this is OK financially it is not sustainable when it interrupts the dynamics of the community on an every day interaction level. This is why our forthcoming "influence" score will start again every month and why nearly all your Crowdify points will disappear every month if you have not used them.
I believe that you have to give an even chance to someone who just entered the community a month ago to someone who has been there 3 years. Otherwise they will become easily frustrated and continually running off to join the next "big shiny thing". Nobody likes to feel small.
I have had 2 sites which I no longer use much webtoolswiki.com and michaelqtodd.com (they are being incorporated into Crowdify) which have both been in the top 10,000 on Alexa so I know how many visitors this requires.
Empire Kred has around 200 daily active users left and while Steemit has more it is not significantly more as the Alexa results indicate. How do they return to their past glory status of having around 10 times that many regular participants?
Both sites have passionate long term members who want them to succeed long term and I am fairly and squarely with them in that regard. We cannot have too many effective collaborative Pillar 6 communities.
I do not have all the answers but surely a start is to start from scratch each month as far as "in game" influence is concerned? I also 110% believe that both sites will have to start again and repeat that they must become MLMs.
Empire Kred has "eaves" a points system that can be purchased and also experimented with a currency Vees which were tokens and a little like STEEM in as such as you could purchase influence. This I believe is also dangerous and must be carefully monitored as the "haves" may be left with a dwindling number of "have nots" to share their posts around.
I will be fascinated by any thoughts that you have and much appreciate them. Crowdify is an ecommerce and crowdfunding MLM site with little real likeness to Steemit and Empire Kred and will in fact complement both of them. For example you will see that I will run a task in Crowdify asking people to read and share this post. I constantly send our Crowdify community to Empire Kred as well. I firmly believe in abundance.
Thank you for reading
Michael