I saw the translation first-hand over a number of years. There used to be a forum community I was a part of (it was regarded by some as a spin-off of the Someth

I saw the translation first-hand over a number of years. There used to be a forum community I was a part of (it was regarded by some as a spin-off of the Something Awful forums, but that's another story). Many moons ago (roughly 4-5 years or so) it was a great community full of intelligent, witty, fun people. There was almost never a thread that wasn't worth reading in any number of forums there and the moderators took their jobs quite seriously. Basically, good people and good content were everywhere. Then, as time went on, things started going down hill. It's impossible to attribute this to a single event, but a series of circumstances changed that caused the site to lose its quality, both in members and content. There was some serious alienation of Moderators caused by the site owner, the board started becoming more popular via Google and drew many, for lack of a better term, "Publics," etc. Due to these and other events, the best moderators jumped ship or just stopped caring (likely influenced by the owner's lack of involvement, too). The members who contributed the most worthwhile content started leaving as they noticed the boards being overrun with worthless posts. And so it went, until a few months ago when the original owner sold off the site to somebody new who promptly shut the whole place down (after saying he had no plans to change things, or so I heard). It started as a place to make friends, share ideas, create witty banter, etc. Hell, it even lead to a few in-person meet-ups (if you've never attended a party held in another state by some random person you've never met in real life, I highly recommend it). It eventually degraded into "just another forum community" where the few people who still worked to make it a place worth coming to were drowned out by the masses of peasants clamoring "LOL!" There's a 5-year experiment for you ;)