* Most of us understand that Keith's not "going private" because he wants to. He's fighting to keep the site alive - literally keep the lights on. To me, this is this is like a medical triage situation - we must save the site first, and handle the side effects of what we did to save it afterwards.
* Membership loss is one side effect. Lack of new blood is definitely going to be another. That is the one that worries me the most - far more than paying a subscription fee. (I found this place via google and got hooked.) And there will be other side effects we havent thought of yet.
* Keith's looked at the options he feels are credible and going Subscriber-only is the best fit in his view as Proprietor. By "credible", I mean the option is affordable to him and within what he is willing to do. From what he's already said, he's not really seeking more ideas. His son-in-law is a professor of computer science and has presumably helped him weigh what he wants to do. From what I can tell, "this here's a done deal".
Each person will stay or not as they see fit. There will be impacts. We'll either work through them or we won't. But we gotta try.
"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."
“If you want to know what a man's like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.”