I agree that things are somewhat changed these days compared to the past. Whether that is fully bad or even controllable I have my doubts. I don't think it is out of hand, but W&SS is not quite as friendly as it used to be.
A couple of things come to mind.
One, the older members are posting less regularly now for some reason.
Two, the regular addicts (myself being one of them) seem to be posting less prolifically then we used to. Folks like Tonym, J Williams (who only has a moderate addiction instead of severe one now), RescueRiley (who is surviving early parenthood) and even Pitdog who used to post 3 threads a week is down to 1 every week and a half or so.
Three - trip reports, nature walks, photo-essays are less frequent these days and there is less of a culture who views them. There seems to have been some confusion in the last Moderator 'Keep it on topic guys' posting. Some members felt like the mods were directing us to stay only with skills rather than describing wilderness. I know Pitdog felt this way about his frequent dogwalk pics and severely curtailed them.
Four - It strikes me that the views/reply ratio has increased substantially. Getting only two or three replies on a on-topic thread is common now whereas it used to be 9 or 10. Heck, even my 'Post your choppers - chopping' thread would have guaranteed to go logistic last year but it kind of just fobbles along now....I'm even guilty of not flogging my own threads sometime.
Five. It seems the only threads (aside from the most excellent camp knife challenge thread) that get past 2 pages are the controversial ones. This has always been partly the case, but in the past many threads reached 3 or 4 pages without being contraversial. Not all of them are bad and argumentative. The 'eating human meat' one stayed pretty civil if not lapsing into the predictable jokes now and again.
Six - there has been a large wave of 'new comer questions' lately. Overall I think this is a good thing. It provides the platform to recruitment to our little community. However, when you get a wave of new questions it tends to push all the active threads to page 2 and then they disappear into the nether land.
For symptoms 1-6, I view most of these as temporary phenomena. I just think folks are a bit busy and everything goes in cycles. Like any discussion, somebody lets out a silent (but deadly) fart once in a while and you get that awkward pause....
Regarding the comments on the mods. I think they've been doing a good job of things. Special kudos to Joezilla who has been working diligently to post on-topic threads and keep them moving. Both Joe and Esav have been moving inappropriate threads often enough and making good decisions on those moves. It would be great if Kevin and Brian came around more, but I suppose it is difficult, one being a TV-star and the other a Rock-star. I'm still waiting for all their stories to come back to us
We should make a simple few sentences in a Sticky that people can copy and paste into a thread that gets crazy.
You see, its easy to forget how lucky we are sometimes. The little things do matter, and its easy to forget about them when you are focused on the bigger issues that seem to present themselves in everyday life. Anyways...I didnt mean to get this thread about going off topic, off topic. 
