LOL. Excellent question. For the first year, traffic is mostly the same. It’s a matter of setting things up, creating consistency, and just grinding through that first year. From there, forum traffic grows modestly while front page traffic tends to take off.
We’re not after the Facebook/Twitter crowd in particular, not even a little bit. I believe our sites are a place to escape those monstrosities, not become them. I will (and do) happily sacrifice pure numbers in favor of being the smartest place to hang out, not the biggest.
We want the right kind of new users, not just new users. It’s why we moderate pretty heavily when it comes to insults, whether that be toward other users or team personnel. Tone matters a lot. There are plenty of places to be a mouth-breathing dipshit on the internet; I want to provide an alternative to that experience.