I was a reddit lurker before comments and subreddits. I joined to take part in the community. Then the Digg invasion. Then the "le reddit army" invasions. The community there became something I no longer wished to be a part of. The last straw was when they made /r/space a default. The good commentary and articles got washed away in memes and 10-year old Hubble imagery along with other low value content.

Honestly, what's the point of this survey? Everything I said above is well documented on a thousand blogs written by people far more articulate than I. Websites start, develop a community. That community gets noticed by outsiders who see some neat stuff going on, interesting topics, lively debates, etc. Then you get noticed by someone who writes something that goes viral and you get your first wave of new blood. They meld into the community or leave. Next the site gets big, and the original people who made the community interesting start to fade away into the background of the waves of new users. Then the site has to find a way to fund itself and the cancer begins. Lively debate and interesting people make a community, but they don't generate ad revenue and clickbait outrage. People like me start to feel unwanted because people like me are not the target audience of a commercial ad-supported web site so , so we bail to the new small community of interesting people having lively conversations. This is the Web 2.0 business cycle, well documented at this point. To me, it looks like that lasts 5-6 years.

My hope is that Hubski is different in that with the site being 90% text, no downvoting, and a forum design that encourages long form conversation. You have to work to fit into the community here. No memes and lolcats, no low value content (depending on your definition of said content) and the community is still that size where the site moves slow enough that you can read what is going on and not miss too much.