I never returned to the site after months of errors and problems even loading the website. I forgot it was around and wasn't keeping up.

This is an explanation from a (downvoted -27) admin on that thread:

In short, we fell victim to our own naive idealism. We allowed nazis and incels to destroy the site, because we believed that stopping them would be compromising our promise of free speech. In hindsight, we should have cut them out sooner.

This is a comment from a Guildsmith? on that thread, in response to the admin:

What he just said is false. What happened to Ruqqus is utterly incompetent, ungrateful, and condescending leadership. Literally, all these guys can do is code - no other function.

captainmeta4 cannot talk to Ruqqus userbase about anything other than an update without insulting them. He has none of the skills of a leader, ceo, or frontman. He's the kind of guy that needs to be hidden away, locked in an office, and prevented from ever interacting with the public because he simply cannot. Yet, he was leading the show - he was telling users "your opinions don't matter," he was appointing himself guildmaster and changing guild settings, he was banning people from official Ruqqus guilds because he didn't like their on-topic posts.

kek is a follower poorly imitating what he's read in tech magazines and journals. He is young and unable to acknowledge captainmeta4's poor leadership or synthesize what it means.

Arkitect has been MIA almost the entire time, but I suspect he just goes along with whatever it is captainmeta4 is doing.

All of them completely and utterly refuse to acknowledge the role they played and the ultimate responsibility they bare for the events that led to the failure of Ruqqus as a social media platform. They did this every step of the way and they still do it. They will make excuses that look like they were ripped from poorly written press statements, they will blame their early adopting userbase, they will lie. But, Ruqqus failed this early on - despite initial excitement - for no reason other than how they behaved and the choices they made.

That, in a nutshell is what killed Ruqqus, but more specifically, there's this;

1. The admins were only interested in suggestions and feedback from a relatively small group of Ruqqus Discord users. These users differ/differed significantly from the average Ruqqus user and actively despised them. They would antagonize Ruqqus users via brigading, guild seiging, general harassment, and "feature" and policy suggestions that you'd think would be very questionable on their face - but, apparently not to Ruqqus admins. As you'd hopefully not expect, Ruqqus admins enabled this behavior by refusing to address brigading entirely, preemptively telling Ruqqus Discord about the bans of guildmasters (which enabled Ruqqus Discord members to seige and subvert entire communities before actual members of the guild could do anything about it), allowing and partaking in the harassment and name-calling of users they didn't like, and implementing "features" and policies that were counter to their initial "free speech" and "if it's legal, it's allowed" premises. Yet, when users reacted, the admins shit on them harder and told them it was their fault.

2. The admins outright refused to accept their niche, they thought they could compete with Reddit on apolitical content, and they refused to market Ruqqus at all (primarily because carpathianflorist said marketing Ruqqus and/or trying to get more people to hear about it was stupid). But, it makes sense, right? You yourselves are allegedly right-wingers and you have a right-wing niche, so it might be productive to at least try to make Ruqqus known to other right-wingers (the people it already appeals to and who are actively looking for a place to go because of ban waves) via sharing about it on right-wing forums, the comment sections of right-wing youtubers and podcasters, you might even try to get some personalities to mention your new social media platform, right? But, no. The admins were oddly obsessed with keeping right-wingers off the site, "containing" their current userbase, and "getting more left-wing and apolitical content" (which would've come naturally with more users in general) - they were obsessed with making another Reddit "but without censorship." And for whatever reason, they thought carpathianflorist - openly authoritarian left-winger and "drama connoisseur" was the guy to listen to.

Now, Ruqqus was created as a reaction to the massing banning of right-wing and anti-woke communities on Reddit and so, that's who predominantly came to Ruqqus. Yet, the majority of the Ruqqus Discord users who had any meaningful say or rapport with the admins were left-wing (especially the leader, carpathianflorist) or "i-wanna-be-nice" type republicans; literally liquid food for thought.

They don't want to talk about it and keep making up excuses because they look stupid for the whole thing.