###Our attrition rate is concerning.

New users just don't stick around anywhere close to how they did a few years ago. I'm not going to post the exact rates, and I'm not going to post the exact metrics that we use to consider someone 'lost' as far as likely to re-engage, but I will explain it in very simple terms.

Let's say you have a bank account. Every month, $1000 goes into that account, and $960 goes out of it. You will never lose your income, and your expenses will always stay the same. Sure, you don't manage to save much, but year over year, it adds up, right?

Well, what happens if the income isn't infinite? Let's not talk about money, let's talk about users, the size of the market that we serve, and the rate at which it grows and replenishes. If we lose even 25% of the users we manage to convince to interact with our sites, and the number that try every day keeps going up exponentially, then it's only a matter of time before we burn through an entire market faster than that market significantly replenishes itself.

This is because people had really bad first experiences, and depending on how influential they are, we've lost them and possibly dozens more. It's difficult to calculate who won't try something because of this. But if we don't control this rate, we could (much sooner than later) say that the whole market uses, has tried and stopped using, or won't try our sites.

That is to say, there's a hard stop where you run out of people that are (1) interested in [topic] and (2) successful using your software, and the faster you hemorrhage new users, the faster you approach that point. This is where new users don't replace long-term engaged users that tend to just naturally move on after they've done all they came here to do. This "shrink" in communities is perennial and usually healthy, as long as you eventually move to more coming in than leaving.

###What does our long term community need?

###What does our long term community need to feel valued?

Our attrition rate is concerning.

New users just don't stick around anywhere close to how they did a few years ago. I'm not going to post the exact rates, and I'm not going to post the exact metrics that we use to consider someone 'lost' as far as likely to re-engage, but I will explain it in very simple terms.

Let's say you have a bank account. Every month, $1000 goes into that account, and $960 goes out of it. You will never lose your income, and your expenses will always stay the same. Sure, you don't manage to save much, but year over year, it adds up, right?

Well, what happens if the income isn't infinite? Let's not talk about money, let's talk about users, the size of the market that we serve, and the rate at which it grows and replenishes. If we lose even 25% of the users we manage to convince to interact with our sites, and the number that try every day keeps going up exponentially, then it's only a matter of time before we burn through an entire market faster than that market significantly replenishes itself.

This is because people had really bad first experiences, and depending on how influential they are, we've lost them and possibly dozens more. It's difficult to calculate who won't try something because of this. But if we don't control this rate, we could (much sooner than later) say that the whole market uses, has tried and stopped using, or won't try our sites.

That is to say, there's a hard stop where you run out of people that are (1) interested in [topic] and (2) successful using your software, and the faster you hemorrhage new users, the faster you approach that point. This is where new users don't replace long-term engaged users that tend to just naturally move on after they've done all they came here to do. This "shrink" in communities is perennial and usually healthy, as long as you eventually move to more coming in than leaving.

What does our long term community need?

What does our long term community need to feel valued?

Note: Tim Post has written another answer which goes into further discussion about user attrition and site priorities that is relevant to this discussion.