Thing is, the forums aren't enough of a draw for people to fight for any more, outside the handful of commutroons trying to turn it into their personal hugbox. For every sane poster who protests at the insanity (and gets called a Nazi for their trouble), a hundred just quietly leave. In 2004 there wasn't anywhere like SA on the web, but now you can get the posting experience you want at a dozen different places - KF, Reddit, Nu-NeoGaf, Facebook groups, the chans, Discord, depending on what you want to talk about and the kind of people you want to talk with. Most of those places don't charge money, most have functional code, and most aren't run by philandering pillheads. Why post on SA now, aside from inertia? It hasn't been anything special for a decade, and now it is actively driving people away who otherwise would have stayed simply because they are used to the place.
Much as I've slated SA here, I've never raised a fuss on the forums themselves, because why? What would it achieve? It's clear where the forums are headed and people like me aren't part of that. Suiciding my account won't change that, I just get my shitposting fix elsewhere, along with thousands of others and nearly a third of Lowtax's January Patreon donators and counting. People aren't raising their voices in protest because they don't care enough and have better alternatives. Over a decade of terrible modding, incompetent coding, a drug-addled absentee owner and a failure to keep up with the competition have made SA lose what once made it unique. Now it's just like other forums, but worse. It's not worth fighting for when you feel you are being driven out, you just wander off, and it's happening en masse now.