Thank you for this piece - it is hard as a new member to understand The Good Old Days. There is such a fire hose of posts to sort through now. It astonishes me how much straight plagiarism I see. What's worse, as a new user, is to see how much this doesn't resemble the promised meritocracy. There is a user (and I am not here to call anyone out), who posts 4-5 health topics per day. They consist of links with cut and paste content from pop press, followed by a few sentences of not insightful commentary. They are quickly upvoted to $100+ value - and have 2x the upvotes that there are views. I don't think anyone is finding the content useful (if you are, I'm happy to direct you to yahoo health, which offers more links and deeper commentary).
However, I'm encouraged by your post and hopeful that more people will focus on the community that one can create. I have been trying to create homeschool roll calls (you came up!) and meaningful original content about learning, parenting, and teaching kids to gamble .