As for the user base that looks down, I've actually had the same hunch since december 2019 so I created a
special thread to find out why. As of December 3, 2019, this forum still has 133,934 active users according to bpip.org, but today we only have 98,669 logged-in profiles in the last 3 month. Obviously I can feel a lot of decline in term of the number of users. But if the orientation is on quality, I think this forum looks much better than before January 2018 or before the merit system was implemented.
If you were saying that even if the numbers decline rapidly for the past years, but when the quality of posts increases does that mean that we are actually not using base users?
If we are losing users who are actually not contributing with a single thing in this forum that is actually better for the community in the long run.