Can someone explain to me why ERA doesn't seem to go down in user numbers? Are they really getting new people at a rate that is at least equivalent to the rate they're banning people?
Era has really good SEO, so people that find the place naturally are going to end up signing up. Then you got some people that have inflated its level of importance in their minds like communities looking for leaks and whatnot, so they hear about the place and try to sign up as well. Of course you also have to take into account trolls and alts signing up.
That said activity levels and unique posters are always going to be the metric to watch rather than actual membership number. New sign ups do indeed outpace bans in the long run (at least for now), but conversely, they do not outpace members that go inactive. Active posters number in the 4-6k range (not taking into account active alts) when at one point it was 8k+. Right now, that number is supposedly on the decline, but it's hard to know because there was a hardware failure involved in the method to find these numbers, so who actually knows at this point.
But still, the member count on the front page means nothing if only 1/10th of that number actually posts regularly with that number seemingly not getting any bigger.