Half the Time the Website Did Not Get Worse. You Got Older.

Everyone has a website that used to be good. I have four. Having been on the inside of one of them for six years, with access to the data, I can say that in two of the four cases the place genuinely deteriorated and in the other two it did not, and I could not tell the difference from the outside.

The two that actually got worse have a signature you can check. Specific things stopped working: the search, the moderation response time, a feature that was removed. The people who were doing the good work left, identifiably, and you can find where they went. Complaints about the decline are about particular changes with dates on them.

The two that did not get worse have a different signature. The complaints are general — the vibe, the quality, the type of person here now — and they have been made continuously for as long as the place has existed, including during the period the complainer now remembers as the good era. That last part is the strongest test I know, and it is checkable in any archive: go and find the posts from your golden age saying that it was better two years earlier. They are always there.

What actually changed in those two cases is a combination of things about me. I stopped being new, which means I stopped having the experience of discovering the place. The people I formed my sense of it with drifted off, individually and unremarkably. And my own use changed: I went from participating to reading, and reading a place you used to participate in is a much thinner experience that feels like the place has become thin.

I am not making an argument that nostalgia is always the answer, because in two of my four cases it plainly was not. I am arguing that the two look identical from inside and that the pleasant conclusion — the place got worse, nothing about me changed — is the one that arrives automatically.

The practical version, if you want to check: name three specific things that are worse, with approximate dates. If you can, the decline is probably real and the useful question is where the people went, because they went somewhere. If you cannot name three, and the complaint stays general no matter how long you sit with it, then the honest possibility is that you have stopped being the person the place is for, which is not a tragedy and is a much easier thing to act on.

What I did about the two that were fine: I left one, because I had stopped enjoying it and there was no injury to nurse. The other I still read, with reduced expectations and a considerably better time, having given up the idea that it owed me the feeling I had at twenty-four.