While I do miss the sheer traffic and spectacle of the old days, I sure don't miss the rampant trolling and bickering. Overall, vgchartz has undergone a vast transformation since I joined. The internet is still full of morons, but the style of the moderation and the overall ambiance of this place has evolved into something that works properly and doesn't really attract these, which is a first as far as forums go (in my experience). I would rather have better discussions than lots of discussions - if I had to choose.
We're not dead, which in itself is a fantastic achievement, most sites, and forums that lived past a decade are owned and run by huge corporate entities or companies or are simply tiny niche things for followers of specific games, books, or other phenomena. It's amazing we're still around, and I'm always happy when I see other veterans posting, I feel like I really know these people despite never having met them in real life.

The downfall of this site were certain ban happy mods and the constant complaining from ninty fans. The removal of the sales graphs and charts.
For me personally what killed the forum aspect was the "official" Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft threads that lump all the discussions and news together. Threads get closed because what you want to talk about has already ever so slightly been mentioned in the official threads amongst another 100 topics running simultaneously. It's a cluster F.
Just my 2 pence.

I used to make threads all the time and stopped for the very reason that they kept getting closed because those topics were "Already being discussed".

This is something I totally agree with. Interaction in this site has become mostly fantastic and cozy, if anything. Last couple of months has seen a dramatic reduction in threads created, though, but that's just an impression of mine. 

This is why I continue to visit this site.  I’m not a huge fan of trolls and general spam.  A smaller forum means you actually get to know the people you’re talking to.  It doesn’t have to be a bad thing that there aren’t thousands of posts a day from thousands of people.  It’s actually the reason I’ve continued on this site.

Wow, when was that?

I can agree with obieslut that the former mod team would lock threads because of duplicates/outside nation/official threads but that must have been over 10 years ago

I dont but that rewards you with bans for things like "no shit sherlock"

I agree that the nation threads seem to be a net negative. They'd be fine if they stuck only to discussions that aren't a big enough deal to warrant their own thread. But, as it is, most major pieces of platform specific news get a bunch of their discussion inside of the nation threads. The problem is that it is sometimes difficult to have a good discussion about a specific topic in those threads, because there are multiple topics running at once.  But, because there is discussion about a given topic happening in there, it likely leads to less interaction in the topic specific thread.

I think the nation threads are great for the relatively small number of users that spend a lot of time in them. But, for the rest of us, and certainly for any newcomers, they're sometimes not the greatest places to jump into a discussion. 

At least, that's how it feels to me.    

Incidentally, my impression is that as forum activity has slowed, article commenting activity has picked up. It hasn't picked up enough to offset the slowdown of the forums, but I feel like as a percentage of activity around here, article comments are noticeably up.