I don't really have an answer to this, I'm just posting this here because it isn't suitable as a comment.
There are a few things I've noticed about this site, and these relate in big part to what other people have already said.
I'm a very-low-rep user on this site (although now that I think about it, I'm only four points away from being allowed on the site ranks, which will actually put me as the fourth highest, so maybe I'm not that low after all), but the points I did get were over a relatively short time--half of my real rep points here were in fact awarded on a single day. So I'd comfortably call myself one of the "frequent posters of the past [who] have come and gone" that George White mentioned in his answer. Given that not-so-admirable status, I'll say that my primary reason for not being all that interested in sticking around has just been the limited nature of questions.
I realize that the goal of the site is to provide help and understanding with regards to the patent system and to fulfil prior art requests, but that latter aspect just doesn't seem even remotely interesting to me. I know that sounds super pretentious, and I really hope I'm not coming off as mean as I kind of feel like I am, but when all is said and done, the question "what's the difference between a provisional and non-provisional application?" seems a whole lot more interesting and useful to me, than someone asking "has this application been approved?" I would be way more willing to answer "how can I find whether a patent has been issued, given an application number?" than something specific to a single patent.
I'm in a much higher ranking on both Stack Overflow and the newly-publicized Startups Stack Exchange, and questions like these would never fly on either of them. They're just too specific.
I think the general philosophy of the site explicitly encourages highly personalized questions and answers, and those types of questions are inherently low-quality.
So while I find the topic interesting, certainly, and I'm in no way meaning to imply that there are no good questions and answers here, reading through all the bad ones just doesn't seem all that engaging, so I haven't bothered. But the thing is, I never even know whether I should mark those "bad ones" as bad via a close vote, because--particularly with the welcoming of specific patent-number-based tags--I'm not actually sure they in any way work against the goal of the site.
To put things in perspective, I've gotten three up-votes on my answer to Is this patent (US20060098849 A1) still pending?, and while I certainly appreciate said rep points (for what it's worth, I did answer the question and give my source), I'm not particularly proud of that answer. I took the two minutes it takes to visit Public PAIR and copy over the application number, not particularly impressive. The thing that I really fail to understand about it, too, is that I'm actually still getting points for that question. In fact, I got up-voted on it just today and it's over a month old.
Then when you line it up side-to-side with Which is better, to patent or keep secret, where my answer received the same number of votes, I just feel like there's not a huge driving force of the community to promote thought-out and generalized questions and answers.
So anyways, again, not really an answer. But I just thought I'd throw in some of my motivations for not spending more time here. Honestly, I feel like the site is just built in the wrong direction. I think it's an interesting topic that it's set out on, but I also don't think it's in any way congruent with the overarching philosophies of the Stack Exchange community.
Several days later, I was just thinking about yet another aspect that I think affects all this.
The mission statement of Ask Patents is arguably somewhat in opposition to the patent system. It alludes to a broken system in which overly broad patents are continually allowed through that then bar innovation on other fronts. The concept in general of crowd-funded prior art requests show a lack of trust in the USPTO.
Now, that mistrust might be fair. I'm pretty sure absolutely none of us will argue that the patent system isn't at least a little bit broken. But that said, I don't believe it's that bad, and I particularly don't believe that this site takes many steps to make it any better, for a couple of reasons.
- People who are attracted to answering questions on Ask Patents are probably not going to be the type to fundamentally not believe in patents. I don't know some of your backgrounds--I know George White is a patent professional and I've grown up around them through my father and many of his friends being patent attorneys--but in general, people who are enthusiastic to answer questions about patents will be proponents of the system as a whole.
- The majority of questions on here that do request any sort of prior art, or show any sort of concern about patents, are blatantly wrong. I've seen a number of questions like the one I'm thinking of, so I won't bother finding a link, but basically people are saying something to the gist of "why does anyone care about patents when obviously Microsoft ignores {some list of Samsung patents}?" when in actuality, those are almost definitely licensed in some day. So even what concern is valid about the system, isn't being conveyed through most questions on here.
Perhaps I just feel like "provide information about the patent system" and "fulfill prior art requests for potentially dangerous applications" are extremely different topics. And I'm not sure either has a large enough following right now to keep up an interesting site.