we saw a noticeable decrease in traffic and new subscriptions.

That might be a good idea for a while. It's not so bad right now, but there have been several times over the past couple months where I've just stopped wanting to come here because of the brigades and wandering front page leftists. Outreach and exposure has its place, but some of us like having this be a place that's just for conservatives and not having to deal with hordes of communists stopping by just to shit on us because they clicked on one of our links on the front page. I grow really tired of having to report 20 different users for various brigading and trolling activity in those large threads day after day. A little slow down in growth, at least for a while, might be a good thing.