User blog comment:LostInRiverview/Community Chat: November 18, 2015/@comment-24258073-20151121053245

There are quite a few problems I've been noticing that relate here. For one thing, a lot of newer and less experienced users generally haven't been participating in important community discussions.

This includes community discussions, since the newer and less experienced users, while they don't refuse to participate in these discussions out of hand, they certainly don't participate as frequently as the older, more experienced and active users do. This isn't necessarily unexpected but the number of inexperienced users that participate in these discussions could certainly be increased.

Now this is where the snowball clause comes in, but with discussions regarding user rights promotions, namely RfAs and RfBs, I've noticed that when one nomination starts, the newer and less experienced users typically only participate if the discussions if they've only just started and thus no one else has participated, or if there's significantly more users who are supportive of the nominee than there are users who are opposed to the said candidate.

I've also noticed that in certain features like battles for instance, the number of participants seem to have decreased, however slightly, over the years. The drop has been much more noticeable for the fanon battles. Yes, the fanon battles were never really as successful as the canon ones, but for these reasons, we had to retire the fanon battles indefinitely.