Say you're throwing a party, and it's a good one. When it's time for someone to leave, do you say "Cheers for stopping by, it's been really fun!" or do you say "No, please don't go, I'll pull out the futon, we have to keep this going..."

You do the first one because you're not a BLOODY CRAZY PERSON. Or a website.

Let people leave your website!

If some of the issues brought up in the thread are social justice issues, then WOE BETIDE YE.

Progressive/leftist online spaces have their own set of problems unique to them, which I might have a chat about at some point when wiping my arse with 80-grit sandpaper isn't enough to shake the cobwebs off in the morning.

3. This is the dumbest part. People (who are STILL THERE) will chime in to say "Well I left because of $myParticularIssue, there's one data point."

Oh you left did you love, left forever and just happened to pop in randomly just for this thread, you were dead but you got better, aye fair do's

Anyway the arguing about why people left. There are parallels here with people arguing about where your "you" goes when you die.

1. You can't ever know. You can't ask someone, because they're not here. If you email someone and ask, then you'll be emailing someone who was well known enough on the site to have their otherly-online identities known, and they leave for different reasons.

2. The actual reason people leave (it's JUST a WEBSITE) is emotionally unsatisfying and we want an alternative!

Remember, the only people who participate in "State of the Site" threads are people who've already been here too long. Newbies don't look at that stuff. Christ, why would they?

A thread like this can spin its wheels into hundreds of extremely unhelpful comments and the mods won't shut it down because to do so would be a Bad Look, given that the thread is full of complaints about the site and heartfelt pleas to have $yourParticularIssue taken seriously because the admin's failure to properly address it is *obviously* the reason numbers are dropping.

Also, these threads do, occasionally, provide a nugget of semi-helpful advice, if one is willing to fish around for it.

State of the Site updates where everyone freaks out about declining numbers are a characteristic of Heartbreak Mode, and in threads like this, the reason why everyone left the site is, obviously, the reason you personally are unhappy being on the site.

Everyone in this thread is unhappy for a different reason and this is a GREAT thing to fight over because no side ever gets proven wrong.

Online community management thread continued, back to talking about the decline phase:

I touched on this earlier, but members leave websites because... well, they're websites, and staying on one website for a decade is WEIRD. Nobody does that, really.

I had a good furtle around in a "state of the site" thread on a big, old website currently stuck in Heartbreak Mode (I won't name the site) and to read that thread you'd think the only people left on the site are people who shouldn't be.

Talk about your day a bit. Tread a real fine line between being absolutely robotic customer service person and letting a bunch of Internet People know too much about you.

Oh and don't talk like a customer service person. If you talk like customer service then people will treat you like customer service and christ you've seen how people treat customer service

Tonight I'm making a new Monthly Memento, that's a thing you get if you give me a tenner, and it's different every month. This month it's a rainbow torch (flashlight to you americans) and I would've done it last night but I had an absolutely banging migraine so right now the item's in the game but the description reads "This'll do something tomorrow, tonight I have a banging migraine thx 4 patience"

THIS ALSO HELPS REMIND YOUR COMMUNITY MEMBERS THAT THEIR ADMIN IS A REAL ACTUAL PERSON

Oh yeah, herding cats. Trying not to end up in a situation where I have to live with the idea that a thing I spent thousands of hours building might be making someone's life measurably worse.

You don't HAVE to have a bunch of neuroses to do this job, but if you don't, you will.

Right I'm actually gonna try and write some code for a minute haha

what was I talking about

(what I love about it most especially is that the river, the fancy yachting club downstream on the way to the pub, the water in general is filled with middle class people and we float right through it all in this noisy smelly belching rotting hulk and we see all these posh people with their upper lips doing that thing and we tip our cans of lager at them and give them a cheery wink. It's not a middle class boat and I'm not middle class. /boat)

(oh man I wanna circle back to that boat thing real quick in case you get the wrong idea and think I'm posh - it's not my boat, it's my father's boat.

wait that's even worse. Okay so my dad bought an air compressor for fifty quid off this bloke in the 90's and he was umming and ahhing and getting ready to offer him thirty but the guy said oh go on I'll chuck in this boat. That's how fancy it is. It smells & is filled with men drinking lager from cans. It's a floating dumpster and we love it.)

Here's the MotD on my site where we started operation stair repair. This names lots of barriers to reporting:
https://www.improbableisland.com/motd.php?id=467

This and the followup MotD are linked to from the Code of Conduct (linked a few times in the thread).

Naming the barriers to reporting is as important as naming and dissecting the tactics of abusers. This helps create an environment where abusers don't have it so easy. I call this "manipulation inoculation."

People might not report their abusers because their abusers are well liked (they always are, that's how they get away with it) or because they're not sure they're being abused or if it's all in their head (they're being gaslit) or because the abuser's got dirt on them and might retaliate, or for all sorts of other reasons. These are all barriers to reporting.

NAME THEM AND TALK ABOUT THEM ON YOUR SITE. Then people will notice that they have their own barriers and that helps to dismantle them.

This is a very roundabout thread but I see I've got people reading it and this bit's important so I'm just gonna whack it in there: people generally don't report abusers.

This isn't because your site has an atmosphere where people are afraid to talk to the mods and you suck. Well, I mean, you might, but that's besides the point, even if you didn't suck people still wouldn't report their abusers for ALL SORTS OF REASONS.

These are known among certain circles as Barriers To Reporting.

(the physical design of your site, the colours, the layout, set the tone for how people behave on it, moreso than you think.)

Anyway we used to mention that in the site rules, the more-people-married-than-banned thing - it's still true, but we took it out because having it there could give people - maybe people trying to work up the nerve to report an abuser - the impression that we don't ban enough people. Or that we want to preserve this ratio by not banning people who need banned.

(and that's a thing. Your mods steer the site's culture like steering an old, mouldy boat - try it if you ever get the chance, you make a tiny correction and then ten seconds later you see the shift, it's not like steering a bike or a car where you see instant results, at least unless you're being really heavy-handed. If you get the culture and atmosphere straight enough then the members set the tone and things tick over with much less direct intervention necessary)

We've been really lucky and we've actually had more marriages than bans. That's partially down to the site being designed to deliberately put off a good chunk of its potential audience by, like, being text-based, having a big wall right at the start (hi hypothetical tech blogs, I see you sputtering there, yes this is the opposite of what y'all do and I do it on purpose), and partially down to the general culture and atmosphere kinda guiding people towards non-dickery.