All these women and minorities having the leave the forum! Oh noes!
In my experience, what that means is that two or three posters make a really huge stink about how they no longer feel 'safe', because people who disagree with them aren't immediately banned on their say-so. That's how the site caters to the bigots and trolls. These are people who want to be able to tell people to fuck off and die with impunity, as the very telling "veil of civility" makes clear; they feel marginalised because they don't want to be part of a community, they want to vent their anger and hate and have all the other users tell them how Stunning and Brave they are. To them, disagreement is oppression, no matter how small, and they get to be as toxic as possible but it's OK because 'minority'.
Because they make such a huge noise about how terrible conditions are, all the sycophants who want to be woke go, 'It must be justified! A minority claims they have been discriminated against, so it has to be true, they couldn't ever lie about something so important!' And it becomes, even in the egregiously blatant hugbox of ResetEra, a community where they claim minorities are being driven off in droves and everyone is secretly a Nazi troll, inevitably based on around a tiny number of people leaving, who are drama whores that every community is better off without.
Meanwhile, those numerous commenters who say things like, 'Hey, maybe we're a little too eager to ban people for wrongthink? Perhaps we can discuss something as innocuous as a computer game without calling people Nazis?' get attacked and banned. And even if the ban isn't permanent, they just ... stop coming to the site. No big mic drop of an exit, they don't feel welcome or able to have a conversation, so they remove the bookmark and go elsewhere.
It's a longer version of 'get woke, go broke', because the users who actively drive other members away are celebrated, given leeway, and even mourned if they finally go so far that even lenient mods can't accept their behaviour - but that larger, quieter population, that actually makes for a community, goes away, and suddenly the forum loses income. It varies from place to place with particular forum setups and income streams, but it's always a bad sign when the alleged target audience and the actual target audience are so divergent.
www.resetera.com
