I know for a fact that people left because of him.
The post count isn't anywhere near enough to make this a good site, we definitely need new people. My feeling is that we're not going to suddenly see a resurgence I don't think we've done anything wrong though, the whole concept of messageboards is less popular than it used to be, people have moved on to chatting about things on FB and in other ways. I couldn't work out if you were accusing me of discouraging discussion, I don't see how I've ever done that.