Because the numbers are inflated by bots. There's 700 accounts that never logged in and never confirmed their email. So the actual user count is more akin to 1500, and that has been stable for quite a long time actually.

I like to think they're just sending questions to themselves in a self contained private friend group hovering just outside the public feed. I remember there being role playing accounts like that on formspring and you could sometimes find them if one of the members posted something to a public question and exposed their circle.

Well I remember what I really enjoyed about the older versions of the site was the ability to post pictures and gifs and fuckin tag people. This site is very limiting.

I'll bet half of them belong to the "anon".

comes running back What’d I miss?

Don't be fooled. Despite making up 99% of throwaway accounts, only 1 salty anon is responsible for the bulk.

On a more serious note, yeah, lack of features. It's understandable tough, serving media is e x p e n s i v e.
Tough integrating your thrid party favourite, like imgur or federated software would be a choice solution here.

Basically some bb-codes to embed certain media. Links are a good way to do that right now, maybe using a client side script to enhance the experience would be an intermediate solution? tough you gotta trust your sources :)

I think disruptions during the history and lack of spirit and the fashion to change social media .... recently you are dead when you are not on TicToc, and most recently people whine about lack of real contact to real people, but such wasn't in high demand as most only contact their phone and are quite promiscuous in dealing with "friends" in a high frequency on different virtual channels, or am I mistaken?

because most people have to be bombarded with colorful pictures in order to be entertained

Because people are looking for more/better features more than likely and the Q&A format on its own is not enough for them