I'm not so sure. Once a clique has formed, I think there's a degree of infatuation, whereby a person will glorify his friends' talents but then overlook or even ignore these same people's flaws. Whether this happens consciously or subconsciously I cannot say, but in any case, just read any Guildmate's biography with a "Friends" section and you will witness this bias in action.

I'm obviously not going to name names. But I see Person A gushing in her bio about Person B, and naturally intrigued, I go to Person B's page and browse through his writing. When I see not only stiff, unnatural dialogue and cringeworthy personality development, but also beginner-level shit like mixing up homophones and fucking up punctuation, things which people with "passions" for writing would rather die than do, I realize that Person A has applied a thick layer of sugar frosting over Person B's "amazing" attributes, because they like each other as people.

But then, I'm the sort of guy who thinks friends don't let friends confuse "your" and "you're." So when you say "fewer people are helping each other on this site," I see a silver lining. I might just be a retarded dinosaur, but I'm hard-pressed to admire any community or clique which values obsequiousness over self-improvement. Some people will naturally be scared away by a community which doesn't fawn over them.