Further to the Escape from Kuro5hin post: protagonist Lion Kimbro wrote on MeatBall about his "passage from K5 to Blogs, and Beyond":

I was once a 1 community man. I lived and died by KuroShin. To be sure- I dabbled in other sites. I occasionally pulled my score 5 on Slashdot. But largely, I was a K5 man. This went on for maybe 3 years.

Then one day, something changed. I decided I was curious about the subscription service. You pay a few dollars with paypal, and get a months worth of advanced features.

Wow! What a change! Suddenly, I could subscribe to other peoples' diaries. When I saw someone interesting, I subscribed to their diary, and then I was notified whenever they posted. Why was this so amazing? Because the signal to noise ratio went through the roof! Suddenly, (and it was sudden,) there was a sense of continuity, clarity, and quality, whereas before there was an unconscious noise.

That month quickly expired. Did I renew? No, I did not. Because, amidst the clarity, I learned something from another K5 participant- I learned from Dare Obasanjo that there were things called "Aggregators", that did the same thing as the K5 subscription "watch" feature, for free! But what's more, with the aggregators, you weren't just limited to K5; You could aggregate most anybody's thoughts on the internet.

I tried it. It worked. Not only did it work- it exceeded my imagination.

Not only could I aggregate blog updates, but I could also aggregate wiki changes. That solved the problem of being tied to one wiki at a time!

The stronger the community, the easier it is to remain in its gravitational pull. Kuro5hin is one of those well-designed places that is so full of interesting people that it's tempting to stay there and turn inwards once you've built a bit of social capital. Though there are surely many more interesting people outside K5 than there are inside, few of the active participants link to them. Hence the self-sustaining inward perspective.

Ironically, last year I got a story published on that very site that extolled a particular virtue of online communities. In short, the argument was that the online nature made it much easier for people to belong to several groups at the same time, and that because of that, these spaces would naturally attract innovators and creative people.

What I didn't see at the time was that there existed inexpensive software out there that made it easy to stand on your own, without having to plant your feet inside one particular community or another - and without having to worry about the occlusion caused by the surrounding walls.

That was my last story on K5.