It's a combination of factors that has slowed traffic to our site (and our sister site, Neurotalk).

- Primarily it's a result of Google's ever-changing algorithm. They have a special (expensive) deal with Reddit, so will always show those "organic" search results above other forums like ours. It's beyond a shame, but there's nothing we can do about it.

- Social media, for better or worse, is where most people choose to spend their time online nowadays. Since people have finite hours in the day, that means less time on traditional websites like ours.

- Social media is also competing directly with us, in terms of Facebook Groups and similar features that allow you to build & run an online community exclusively on those sites.

- Some of our traffic was driven by our large mental health website that received over 6 million users/month. With that association gone with the sale of the site, some of our referral traffic got taken away.

I know other forums that have shut down because of a long-time dip in traffic. Hopefully it won't come to that for us, as I'm committed to keeping the forums running for as long as possible. Despite the dip in traffic for our community, we have no plans to change anything.

(Yes, in threads like this, you can mention other forums or online communities.)