I've been hanging round SEOmoz for a loooooooong time. I remember reading the blog when it still had its first design, starting to comment on it about 2 years ago, becoming a top ten member (by mozpoints)...

However, a fair while ago I thought I'd launch an experiment. I thought I'd stop commenting so much, and only pop in when I felt I had something to add, and see how long it took for me to be buried by new members. After all, the SEOmoz community is in the tens of thousands. Surely it'd just be a matter of weeks, maybe a few months before I went from top 10 to nowhere?

This, however, hasn't proved to be the case. I fell to about 28, and here I've remained for a long time. Which brings me to a theory...

The SEOmoz community has entered a state of fluid stagnation. What do I mean by this? Well, don't get me wrong, the comments threads are alive and well, and the site has huge readership. But the active community on the site is fairly transient. We don't see so many comments nowadays by the top 30 or so non-staff users as we used to. In fact, most of us hardly ever comment at all.

Now, my theory was that due to this, we'd be overtaken. And yet that hasn't really happened. My new theory is that this is due to the transience of the community. People don't hang around long enough to get the  700+ points they'd need to overtake us.

If I'm right, this creates another interesting question...

Why?

More to the point, it raises a bigger question...

Where do they go?

Where do the users go when they 'graduate' from SEOmoz? Twitter? Facebook? Nowhere? Everywhere?

So here's a question to you. If you read this, and you used to be a heavy hitter on a site, but now not so much, why did you stop, and where did you go to?