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technology
understand
What are the main reasons people leave online communities?
Including usenet groups, mailing lists, fora, social networks, gaming communities etc.
technologyunderstand
Basically what happens, is that a website has eager and enthusiastic people, who are skilled at the website's applicable craft, and they are eager about helping others, and enthusiastic about sharing their substantial and worthwhile expression to the world.
What typically happens to make these people leave eventually, is when attention whores join the website, is that they neglect and censor superior content, and blast their mediocre and misconstrued content and ideals to the site, trying to drown out the prominent signal from the signal vs noise, and unfairly drown it out with wretched noise using herd mentality.
This has happened with Deviantart. Writers Cafe, and now it's starting to happen with Quora.
Deviantart used to be a place full of amazing art, where members were happy to make new friends and review each others work, back in 2006. Now it is full of attention whores drawing crap work, a proliferation of fox animal artwork, people not giving critques, who blast their work to 100 groups. Many talented members have left the community.
Writers Cafe and other writing communities, used to be a place to read work from talented authors and get critique. Now it is full of attention whores who post the same poem 100 times, don't review stories, spend time dating, and posting fanfics and a splurge of photos.
Quora is going down the same path.
Quora used to be a place where really intelligent people who were eager to share their views and ideas with enthusiasm, not feel marginalised or penalised for their views. Now they have their answers collapsed with no recourse or notification as the Flag feature is gone, are attacked personally for their views brandished as bad people, and other such things.
It is hard to know which direction or outcome Quora will come to, as the attention whore problem is new. But what I do know is that I've spoken to clever people who feel this way, who want to leave Quora, stop posting answers, and find a new website to express their views on. People believing that downvoting purely because you disagree with their views, not constituting as censorship, also increases the problem. Also people believe that Quora is against "information diversity", and is purely a website for self gratification, designed to reinforce ones existing views, and marginalise "weak ties", with the absence of the Flag feature.
Basically attention whores are what make all the valuable people leave social networks. They like to bring others down, to bring themselves up.
But why should any of those websites care? They have the page views, and that's all that matters!