I read a monthly update about the Indonesian local board that @skarais posted a few days ago. The decrease in the number of rewards there is very pronounced because last month (June) the number of merit distributed reached 423. For the month of July the number fell very sharply where there were only 230 merit distributed based on the posted data.
Right about that, we went down in July but I really hope we'll do better in August.
The amount of merit distributed in the local board is reflected in how many posts actually deserve it. The more users who are active each month to create posts, the more likely the merit count will be distributed, and I hope we can fix that in August.
Some non- merit source users like me ran out of sMerit last month, so I think that has impacted the stats. I'm also assuming the same thing happened to some other users so the merit distribution in July looks down, so it's not only affected by a factor of 1 merit per tx by merit source or non-merit source. I hope you understand.