deevee opened this issue on Mar 14, 2004 ยท 8 posts
agiel posted Sun, 14 March 2004 at 8:06 PM
I have been visiting online forums / communities ever since I first started with the net. What you are observing is just part of the normal cycle of an online community. People get together around a particular subject, spend a lot of time on it for a while.... then their priorities change, real life steps in, they relocate / find a job / get married / graduate / whatever else. After a while, it seems like the 'old timers' are not as involved as they used to, while another set of people take over with a different way of doing things. I would really be surprised if the voting system was the real reason why so many people are not coming back. Once you understand that there is no way around it being used as a popularity contest, it is easier to care less about making it in the top 20. It is nice to be in there, but there are more important things than that :) Like the satisfaction of creating something personal that didn't exist before... for example...