Angel Serene
I'm an oldbie myself, and I've noticed a decline in users as well, despite what the newbies think. Gaia was way more active back in the day. A lot of the newer members would be surprised if they went back in time to 03-04 and saw what it was like back then. Yeah there were a lot of bots, but those bots were not what made the threads pop. You could walk away from a single thread for a minute and come back to a good 30+ pages to catch up to. (Slightly exaggerated but not by much).
Though back then all we had were chat forums and the arenas. There was not a Towns, or Rally or any games for that matter. It was all about the threads.
You just answered a lot of the reason why Gaia
seems inactive now, and a lot of the reason why I haven't been out much in GCD for the past year or so. (But you excluded guilds from that, which provides a lot of the fun of the forums but with greater control over who's allowed in the cool kids' club.)
Technically speaking, current Gaia is actually many times more active than '03-'04 Gaia. (The maximum users at peak time back then were...1k or 2k by the end of 2003, and I think 5k or 10k at the end of 2004? As I type this - on a Saturday morning on the east coast of the US (so a lot of Californians, who make up a significant portion of the userbase, aren't even up yet) - there are 9,344 Gaians online. That's still a lot (although pretty far off the '06-'08 numbers, although I think much of that was affected by botfarming). It's just that Gaia then was a much smaller world than Gaia is now.
To pivot to Anti-Ling's most recent post: ...actually, that COULD be construed as a sign the site is dying! (Or that its obsessive userbase is growing up, but "dying" sounds more dramatic.) If Gaia isn't capturing the imagination of new people the same way it captured older users' in the past, then that could be a problem.
Yes, the Internet has changed with the proliferation of social media sites, but not THAT much. If you're not still capturing peoples' imagination, then...well, yeah, you might be doing something wrong (or you might just have become the new old trend - in Gaia's case, it's both).