I think the point about ideological diversity is more interesting, although reading old posts in isolation may not clearly indicate that back then most prominent blue avatars were basically seen as clowns. Post count was not inherently worthy of respect a decade ago any more than it is now. That said, I was younger then and more tolerant of ideological diversity and more willing to believe that the other side had points worth considering; I think that this is an evolution that has taken place in the minds of a lot of people here over the last ten years.
You talk of this development as if it was a good thing! (especially the bolded part).I'm simply documenting my thought processes. As I said previously and will restate more strongly, many Atlas Forum power users of the past have the same feelings that I have. The way I see it, there are three ways that you can explain this: either I have outgrown a juvenile interest in "bipartisanship" as I've gained a sense of moral right and wrong, or the transformation of the American right wing into a cult of personality for the most abhorrent man in this country has forced the issue, or else I am simply intolerant and closed-minded in a way that I once was not. Probably it's a combination of all three, but being tut-tutted for it is not likely to change anyone's mind.
I've gone over it in the past, but I think it is a failure that Atlas is so lopsidedly left wing nowadays. The US population is roughly 45-50% right wing. Even if you want to adjust for demographics, the Atlas forum should be somewhere around 1/3 Republican or Republican leaning.
We'd be lucky if that was more like 15% at this point.
The biggest change in that regard doesn't have to do with this forum directly: it's the complete disavowal by the Republican Party not just of intellectual respectability but of coherent thought. The intellectual case for the Bush administration was wrong, but its existence meant that one could position oneself as an intellectual. By contrast, "right-wing intellectuals" online can get somewhere by making obvious criticisms of the Democratic Party agenda, but eventually they face a crossroads where either they have to admit that they voted for Biden anyway or else they have to give away any intellectual pretense by parroting the literally absurd claims of the Republican Party. It's no surprise that people here don't take kindly to the latter option, since that kind of agitprop is not meant for a politically sophisticated audience.
I don't really agree with this take but let's say it is true.
Like I said before, per demographics, Atlas should be in a vacuum around 1/3 Republican; and indeed it was back in the day! You should know better than anyone, just open an old thread and you'll see many more blue avatars and conservatives. Even if they weren't respected (not sure, wasn't there to watch) they were at least here posting among us! I was gone for a long time, so I don't recognize the names of all the posters who popped up in the last five years or so, but the dynamics of the forum in this sense feel similar to what they always have been. The one difference has to do with the obvious fact that avatar color is not indicative of political orientation or even partisanship; it has struck me how many blue avatars now are either not Republicans in any sense or else express sentiments that are unacceptable in the contemporary Republican Party. When I refer to Republican posters, I am not referring to those posters.
One type of Republican poster is the one who treats politics as nothing but a parlor game where they're on the opposite side of the rest of the forum. Republican95 is a good example of this now; Sam Spade is the classic example, even if he wasn't a registered Republican. This type of poster will often make interesting and useful contributions in terms of election analysis and the like (that is to say, the purpose of this forum), but over time their attitude starts to grate on everyone who sees politics as something that actually matters to real people rather than just a way to show everyone how smart you are.
Another type is the blue avatar who refrains from expressing political opinions and often does not really seem to post about politics at all: Rin-chan, who was the first Facebook friend I ever had, is the obvious example of this, and I'm sure there are plenty of blue avatars like this now. Everyone loves these people because they are nice.
Beyond that, it really is very difficult to be a partisan Republican who sincerely believes that Republican Party policies are morally right in the way that Democrats here feel about their party as a rule, because everyone will dismiss your words as laughable or abhorrent or both. (Back in the Bush years, there was a certain type of Christian politics that provided partisan Republicans with this moral dimension, but that never played well on this mostly irreligious forum and political Christianity is thoroughly dead anyway.) This doesn't bother me: Mike Naso did nothing but chant Republican Party rhetoric, and he was justly banned for it, because that's the level of Republican discourse. No thinking person wants or needs that.
So why on Earth did they leave? It's a bit of a failure that Atlas is echochambery (could be worse but we aren't in a good position)
To answer the immediate question at hand, they left because they got bored or otherwise outgrew this place, just like plenty of other posters of all persuasions; continuing to post on a message board for a decade or more is what's strange, not leaving at some point. It seems like what you're really asking is why they haven't been replaced by more right-wing posters, to which you can see what I've already said in this post.
A fair number of conservative posters of old are just not conservative in any sense now: MasterJedi, who still posts here, is one example. Another is Supersoulty, who was always a rarity among Republicans here in that his interest in politics seemed to actually be about helping people. It's not surprising that he was for Bernie Sanders in the last election. Plenty of Republicans here were always sort of liberal to begin with, and the subsequent direction of the Republican Party hasn't really attracted them. A sizable portion of the Republican contingent here has always been made up of teens who identify as Republicans because their parents are Republicans, and sooner or later plenty of those people realize that they're just liberals. (This is not limited to the Internet; I have plenty of friends who were Republican teens and all of them would describe themselves as either liberal or socialist now.)
And then, of course, there's Mike Naso, who, as I mentioned before, is the embodiment of the contemporary Republican Party. He was banned because nobody wanted to see his posts. Welcoming posters like that would certainly help change the partisan alignment of the forum, but it would do so at the expense of most good posters.
I know this was a lot of text, but hopefully it helps explain my views on the dynamics of the forum community.
