RE: Community Building: It's One Thing to GAIN New Users, but Can You RETAIN Them?
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Part of the reason is that they're scaring people away. It reminds me of the time I was in an AOL finance chatroom discussing investing when I was new to the net. I was talking with somebody about how surprised I'd been to learn that a person could make money even when a stock went down in price.
Right on cue, a young teem "mod" showed up and repeatedly threatend to ban me for spreading financial "misinformation." Why everyone knew there was no way to profit from a decline in a stocks price, right? Next thing you know I was booted due to the ignorance of this person.
The entire chatroom erupted in my defense, and I watched as they schooled the teen in shorting a stock, turns out she'd never heard of it, yet someone had put her in charge of a finance chat. The people she kicked out never came back. She had been in the throes of hall monitor syndrome, and had "tossed" plenty of people throughout her reign as the Grand Poobah of the chatroom. This kind of uneducated killjoy will destroy a community.
When the rules list is a mile long and you allow power-hungry nutjobs to hold sway over new members, don't be surprised when retention becomes a problem. Psychopaths and people with "Little Man Syndrome" should never be empowered to run roughshod over your community members. Fix that or it will die. The less friction for members, the better.
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That's one of the reasons why I never could get into using Reddit for anything... too much petty politics among subredditors who seemed to have aspirations of becoming the Grand Poohbah of their own personalized echo chambers.
On the various occasions where I found myself in the role of sysop or admin, I tended to go by the idea that it was best to just let people be people with opinions, and only really intervene when "discussion" collapsed into personal attacks and mudslinging.
=^..^=