I think most of the original community agrees that the combination of moving from invite only to open registration along with a lack of better moderation is where things started coming apart.

And that’s not to blame the moderators. I think they did the best they could. But with the onslaught of spam, they needed more of them, more dedicated (paid) and better moderation tools. They got none of that though.

You can see how that turned out in the screenshot on my site. That’s the front page with crypto spam.