I don't want to correlate this forum's comedown with the mixer ban, even though I've thought of it and it's likely one major factor, but what's the current picture of Bitcointalk according to you? To me, it's declining in genuine interest.
How many users were participants of mixer campaigns? How can just a few users not having a campaign contribute to the forum getting worse. Don't you think it should be more than mixers getting ban and if really it's because of the mixers then it means we don't have that much real active uses on the forum as we are thinking but just a few hundred (considering it was just few hundreds that were participants of the mixers running their signature campaign on the forum). If the mixer ban reduce people engagement on the forum then so be it because at least now we'll be having genuine discussions and not people forcing it because they want to get paid.
We're dealing with uninteresting topics. The "hottest" topic of discussion in the last months is Ordinals, followed by ETFs, and then an endless list of speculation-related threads, which were always a "thing" in the past, but gosh, that just seems like our sole concern nowadays.
My response to this is that it's just this topics turn and this too will pass because I could remember when all the topics getting started were related to Bitcoin Halving and the high fees of Bitcoin but aren't having that anymore. When there's a trending topic, people tend to start topics in relation to that as there'll be more contributions and engagement to the topic because everybody is hearing/talking about it.