I agree with @grayruby. In fact, the first job of the Head of Growth is probably to try and answer some of these questions.

My guess is that there is just a limited market for text-based discussion forums.

Even Reddit, the closest comparison to SN, doesn't have that much real engagement, in my experience. It's mostly just memes and jokes, even on large subs. So for a text-based platform, I think SN probably holds up pretty well in terms of real posts and real discussions. It's probably comparable to some of the more active subs on Reddit.

Of course, Reddit as a whole gets much more engagement. I'm not sure what if anything SN can do about that, given that SN is a bitcoin-focused platform, and there's no real reason to use it if you're not interested in Bitcoin. Until bitcoin becomes mainstream, SN will not be mainstream as a discussion platform.

So SN needs to do a realistic market sizing exercise to see how large the "total addressable market" for the current product really is. If people aren't sticking around, I don't really think it's because the product isn't good, I think it's just because they're just not interested in reading and posting a lot of text.

That's in terms of engagement. How many eyeballs you get is a different matter. For that, I would look into SN's discoverability on Google and other platforms. Are there really great guides or posts here that you think should be at the top of Google search results? Figure out how to surface them.

The second thing I'd probably look into is embedded SN links on other platforms. That will help people share things that are good on SN more easily.