@Popehat Thank you for writing that - you articulated better than I could the difference between “I’m going to stop posting but check in once in a while and monitor the site” and “It was fun, but I reject what that site is now and don’t want to be associated with it”.
It’s impressive, and maybe a little scary, that the site became so prevalent that some people are unwilling to delete their old posts there. I don’t remember this phenomenon on earlier community sites when they fell out of favor.

@christianholt @Popehat I'm thinking of Digg and Slashdot... where else? Maybe in the other cases people didn't have as much of a professional identity wrapped up in the site?

@russellpierce @Popehat I feel like earlier sites were more compartmentalized - twitter really sort of broke the wall of engaging with the public and blurred the line between online persona and real life in the same way AOL brought email and chat rooms to the masses.
For me: IRC, Usenet, Listservs, Slashdot, Plastic, Metafilter, Digg, some vBulletin sites, Reddit, to name a few. Slashdot and Plastic were based on karma/reputation and used moderation/metamoderation too.