I kinda doubt anybody bothered to read every single post back in the day, but it was good because then people could come with a variety of different focuses and find enough topics that were relevant to their interests and just ignore the rest if they so chose. We don't have that kind of wealth of choice now, nor do we have a wealth of different outlooks weighing in on topics. We used to even have enough activity to warrant section-specific mods, so the mods could laser-focus on the type of discussions of greatest interest to them.

I don't really know what's up with the crazy number of active users. I know they're like 99.9% guests, rather than registered members. Like right now, we've got 863 users online, but only 2 are actual members (one being myself). I guess it's just huge amounts of bots?