That sounds though as if you are in a region where community voting has not slowed down tremendously. The situation for users like blania is totally different.
Wayfarer as comically as it may sounds to what some users are used to from many problems, is basically suffering from success with ML as there are some regions where due to ML devaluing Upgrades, Community Voting takes forever. Niantic staff have looked at nominations in question several times from a technical standpoint, which raises the question if everything on that side is working, now other parts of voting processes are causing some problems regionally.
Reviewing itself got more difficult, ML usually picks the easy ones because it can be easily trained on them, leaving us with more borderline eligible and ineligible things, that kills one motivation to review - virtual exploration through cool stuff popping up for review for example. But also, some sit there, look at a nomination, and have difficulties to make a decision. Now that even experienced reviewers have to actievly think through it more instead of just checking some fields, it takes more attention to review too.
Some people stopped or are reviewing less because of the difficulty that has been raised by all of this.
Then, why should someone who has next to no interest in Wayfarer, but in the games, still review? If you want some stops or portals, just submit something ML accepts, get your 4-6 spots in an area and that’s mostly what you need. If the conditions are that they don’t have to give back to the community, a programme where the community originally comes from games and not mapping programmes, that plays a key role in it, they can afford to stay away from it and let it rot, and then it just implodes like a card house.
There might have been an opportunity to instead use more appeals as an incentive or basically Wayfarers new currency to do reviews for, but with more appeals availiable in shorter time frames this is not possible anymore, if it even was to begin with, as I remember the time where appeals where way too unrestricted and queue times were horribly long.
There is not really some other currency they could use at the moment to restore the linked motivation aspect. For very active people like me, earning more nomination slots might be interesting because I manage to hit the 40 per supported game limit more frequently or even at all compared to others, so it is not interesting to them at all.
What should happen is, that the Wayfarer Team comes up with something so the community can stay motivated and is supported, but also communicate what effect these changes have to existing reviewers - I don’t think the average reviewer is aware that with ML and stuff the reviewing of more “use your best judgement” things is what reviewing is like now and the expections of Wayfarer in total from users is not aligning of what it has become now.
