> What I wonder is if despite the general impression that the site has failed it is still meeting the goals set by its owners, and what does goals might be.
I can't imagine that it's meeting any goals at this point. It appears to be mostly on life support.
The site sold for an incredibly small sum of money. I believe it was less than $1 million. Considering what it once was, the sale price was astonishingly low. I think the founders chose the only apparent option that would keep the site alive and save at least a few of the core staff from losing their jobs. I will give them credit, the management team really did care about the site and the users when I worked there, which was from early 2009 to early 2013.
It was the best job I ever had and I loved every minute of the nearly 5 years I spend there. I learned more from that job than any other time in my career and it was really formative for me as an engineer. They had an amazing engineering culture which I haven't found elsewhere. At least sometime in the past they had a really strong drive to create the best place for artists and an incredible team working on making that happen, despite some missteps and controversial decisions. I think what they achieved is remarkable, especially given the small amount of outside investment they took. It was once among the very top sites on the internet, running on a tiny budget with a small team executing really well.
I credit much of the engineering culture to $randomduck and $mccann but there were a lot of brilliant engineers and inspired people working there. I'm happy the site survives in some form but it's sad to see how far it's fallen.