I've been here on and off, if I talk about exo×oc fan works, its indeed sad how things have turned. There are a lot of reasons especially how exo has faced many ups and downs which resulted in fans leaving the fandom. Then there's hostile people on sites like aff and tumblr. Hating on successful authors etc. Silent readers were always here but with site losing traffic, they are more visible. Demanding readers who keep commenting update soon update soon, its a mental torture on authors, they don't have any obligation towards readers unless readers have paid for content. Then there are entitled authors throwing tantrums of how and what readers should comment, writing whole blogs on how a reader should behave lmao (and this wasn't about comments like demanding updates, it was about commenting and criticizing a fictional character's actions lol) these authors didn't want comments they wanted only praises. According to them readers don't have freedom of expression, and that resulted in more silent readers which eventually made authors disappear. Some authors tried monetizing plagiarized fanfics, authors have all the rights to monetize their own content but monetizing ideas they've plagiarized was really low. A lot of authors are victims of plagiarism and it made them stop writing fanfics. There were a lot of good exo ffs, and unfortunately those authors permanently deleted their accounts. The OG exo authors are now in mid twenties, late twenties, early thirties even and hence busy with real life. Lot of content creators have migrated to different fandoms. If you see aespa fanfics on aff, they're buzzing like how exo×oc used to be. Infact aff traffic is more nowadays than what it used to be 2 years back. 2 years back online user count used to be around 500, nowadays whenever I see it is around 1000-1500. In any case unfinished works hurt the most for sure. In conclusion I think user base of aff has shifted back to b×b and g×g content. Users on aff are lesser than exo's peak years but definitely more compared to last 2 years.