My main account over there isn’t that old, but I’ve been using the site off/on for probably at least that long. I mainly was a reader/lurker over there for years as I didn’t really feel like posting as at the time almost everything I posted got downvoted for some reason. Then over time as I got older I cared less about that and started posting more. Last I checked I think my karma was 100,000-something.

IMO, the fact that there’s no desktop version (AFAIK) and they made it so difficult to discover new content, pages/people. etc., & how many of the users are probably just Instagram users who had accounts auto-added & have no interest in Threads, are the main reasons for the decline.

Yes because that’s beneficial to society and definitely not solely for the purpose of making the company and their executives richer.