message to community about community decline

I agree with you that 'user' is sensible nomenclature for people. But if you're referring to their home pages, I think we could start saying "Profile" or similar instead.

The American Psychological Association no longer recommends calling people "subjects" in experiments.

At the MIT Media Lab, in our academic papers, the emerging practice is to call them "people" or "participants."

The only two communities that routinely call people "users" are drug addiction and online communities like Wikipedia, so that antiquated terminology is now being deprecated at MIT as well.

On Wikipedia, we find "Users" who are treated as "lusers" to be mindlessly clobbered by a misguided cadre of adolescent Keystone Kops with their toy banhammers, as if Wikipedia were a lame clone of Zynga's Mafia Wars.