> Perhaps the issue is simply that more of us are inclined to continue discussions rather than start them.

One reason is probably that the system is somewhat circular: fewer active posters make us lurkers less likely to consider starting a conversation, which discourages active posters. I'm not going to post something if it seems like nobody is listening.

It seems that we have this conversation every so often. It may be that Web communities in general are prone to weird fluctuations of interest. I don't think it's entirely unique to RW.

Part of it may be the lack of brand-new content to the main site. The Forum has always been in a way auxiliary to the main content (though of course communities have lives of their own) and there haven't been many totally new features in a while. Sam has been good about providing updates to existing features lately, but compare it to the early days of this forum where brand new features were common. That sort of activity encourages new visitors as well as providing us something to talk about.

Which goes perhaps to a larger issue: this forum has no real topic around which discussion can coalesce. Most of the forums that I read are based around some dynamic thing, be it politics, the media or World of Warcraft. Even mini-forums in the form of personal Web logs are based around the life of the subject of the blog. This makes it hard to know if other people on this forum are going to be interested in something that strikes me as being post-worthy. How many other people are all that interested at RW in whether or not the Republicans are still supporting Tom DeLay or the ethical implications of the New York Times agreeing to delay contacting opposing parties in order to get a scoop of a news-story?

Of course this forum has always had that hurdle to overcome and used to be more active. Part of my own personal reluctance to post comes from the fact that I feel the stuff I'm interested in these days is a little too specialized to be of interest to a lot of other people. But I may well be misjudging things.

Things such as the chatroom and the Web journals that others mentioned probably contribute. There is a lot of crap in blogs that I am glad to see moved out of this forum -- particularly very personal, emotional writings that are diary entries -- but there is also more interesting general interest commentary that the forum misses out on. Wintermute's recent post in his journal about his first experience at a baseball game was funny and insightful; it would have been appropriate for this forum.

I do not believe there is any single answer, and I really should be doing homework so now I'm stopping.

Stephen