I've never used any black-hat or even slightly questionable SEO techniques or means to publicize the site. It started being penalized April 11, which is the launch date of what (IIRC) is being called "Panda 2.0". I've made many changes in hopes of fixing whatever it is that's causing Google to decide that the site is low quality, but haven't seen any improvement in ranking since then. A (now outdated) list of those changes is here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2664346 .