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The core SA audience at its height are in their 30s now, and the internet has changed.

The people who used to deliver content solely on SA for the audience there now have global reach through other platforms. FYAD and FYAD-lite alumni are behind most of weird twitter, they run large communities on Facebook and Tumblr, and some of them even write for the Guardian and Jacobin among others. Youtube replaced SA-based LPs just as surely as it replaced YTMND.

Meanwhile, the administration policies have been as consistently outdated as the forum software, driving dedicated communities to offsite forums and casual information-seekers to the greater resources of Reddit.

Among other stuff, Let's Plays (basically an early version of what guys like TotalBiscuit or PewDiePie do on YouTube now) started on SA and got really popular across the Internet, leading to a huge influx of very different users that completely changed the character of the site.

That was absentee managment as well (lowtax basically disappeared for several years).

But it's still very well moderated.

the Space Flight thread there in 600 pages of some of the coolest info I've read in a while.