How the HELL did you locate a thread like that so quickly? I'm impressed. And this post was extremely interesting to me:
You WERE in a niche forum with many like-minded people. Now, more and more people of diverse cultures, different intelligence and education levels, different age groups, different financial class groups, are all joining up. There's going to be a lot of "stupid questions", a lot of repeated answers, a lot of facepalming. Just deal with it and move on. It's the nature of an open-ended forum.
This is basically what I was saying, except I attributed the "diverse cultures" part of it to signature campaigns, and SgtSpike here obviously did not mean that the influx of those cultures was due to campaigns--they didn't exist then, or at least not in the same way they do now.
The good thing I see is that the posts he called out (facepalming and the like) aren't tolerated here. You can't just post an emoticon or "+1" or whatever, because those will get deleted. That kind of crap is tolerated to no end on other forums, and usually people who write those replies also quote a huge block of text.
I'm so tempted to give SgtSpike a merit....but I won't.