It's important to separate concerns, and I think there are three main things people are complaining about: 1) quality of submissions 2) quality of comments 3)

It's important to separate concerns, and I think there are three main things people are complaining about: 1) quality of submissions 2) quality of comments 3) quality of community It's the second and third that I think have declined. It's not because the people are any less smart, it's that there are just too many of them. It becomes difficult to keep a mental model of everyone in your head, so you start seeing everything as disembodied text, rather than human beings speaking to one another, with a history of shared experiences. IMO, this is a solvable problem. You can use avatars and display our locations next to our comments, or even just make our names a little bigger. Anything to humanize the conversations.