The thing that's crazy about NeoGAF is that its value is completely dependent on the very same users (effectively volunteers in many cases) who inevitably get perma-banned or become disillusioned after seeing their communities get shredded by perma-bans (some users, like Shinobi, become disillusioned for other, less agreeable reasons, but in terms of grunt work are still significant losses to the site that Evilore doesn't seem to care about). The way the community adds new members exacerbates this further, setting it apart from reddit and other forums.
Banning a huge amount of users because they fail to fall in line with the political orthodoxy or, even worse, dare to rustle your ego is equivalent to dumping half your "product" out of spite. Granted, I don't think it's reasonable to keep every single "gamergate" type around, but a side effect of building up this doomed utopia is that you may be throwing away users who can turn NeoGAF to one of the best places to talk about genre X, series Y, era Z, etc., which encourages more dedicated posters to join, who in turn are more dedicated to post content. It's something to be conscious of, especially when the bans (at least in length) come down to mods coming to dislike you over time.
The worst aspect of this is that there was and still is a whole culture where some GAF poster who cares more about videogames than the message board's "norms" says a "dumb" thing (read: something half or more of the internet would say in friendly conversation) and then gets railroaded and dogpilled (and perhaps baited to begin with) by the morality police into a masturbatory "SamuelLJacksonEPICban.gif". Said user may have only posted once or twice in such "controversial" threads and made thousands of posts that actually contributed to what the site is about: videogames. This process, along with hundreds of pages of invasive, off-site e-drama ("Look what this Youtuber did today! FUCK YOUTUBER!!!"x1000) and snidey one-line shit posts, is often the main contribution members of the morality police grant to the site, a stark contrast to the people who want to talk about videogames (or sports, etc.). I admit this is a little hyperbolic (eg. Slayven does contribute to comic book threads), but it's very close to how other people see these users, especially when OT decides to flood into gaming because the main character of Red Dead Redemption 2 isn't black, a woman, or something. Durante, who's arguably one of the more important and notable members of the site, yet doesn't really follow the orthodoxy, seems like a keen candidate to fall into this trap at some point. This
recent exchange is what brought this to mind.
I think Evilore has the impression that the first page views of threads (effectively the news) is what matters most and I'm guessing he has the stats to back that up. This is apparently also why they disrupt very popular (even with outsiders) communities like FGC, STEAM, and GiantBomb threads by sending them into the dead-end community section. The problem for him is that people have to want to be part of the GAF community in order for there to be a functional GAF community in the first place. I think his direction is constantly weakening the site and his actions are like that of a despot high off his own farts, thinking the site needs him (and his incredible 12-man 24/7 tech support team) than he needs the site.
I'm probably only half as frustrated as I sound, but find it interesting enough to end up writing twice more than I intended.
Anyway, forums will probably continue to live on in niche communities, or be reinvented like Discord is a reinvention of IRC. One could argue that Reddit is that and they would probably be right, but that site is more or less designed to bury lengthy long-form exchanges to the point where it becomes an audience of two (not to mention the sheer destruction to decent conversation caused by karma farming and being linked to a hundred other different reddits).
Despite what I said, I don't think NeoGAF is going to disappear anytime soon. It can be in decline for a long time (Something Awful is an apt comparison). If the site dies prematurely, I expect it will be because Evilore throws an apocalyptic meltdown after being embarrassed so bad he needs to disappear from sight. NeoGAF GOLD has to be coming soon though.
