Has the value proposition of a better online community been proved? Are the incentives good enough?
Yes. Yes.
Would SN work without the 50k sats daily rewards donation “subsidy”.
Why not? There are days when there's no reward and I didn't see any slowdown. Maybe some of the Stackers who are only here for sats might leave but SN will keep on thriving. But I also don't think that SN would not have rewards, because ultimately there's a portion of spending that will always go to rewards.
Why has the activity decreased since 2023? Shouldn't the high fiat price of Bitcoin drive attention to sites like this one?
There are some changes like transforming to 'attach wallet'. And I'm not entirely sure whether the activity on SN has dropped in a big way.
top
tab above. https://stacker.news/top/posts/forever