>>715160032
My theory is that the niche of being a "high culture" neckbeard gathering center became less relevant. More and more places on the internet became dedicated to mocking the internet at large and each other, anime went from being for hyperfags at the sites inception to normalfags by mid 2010s, and just a lot of the university-aged userbase in the early 2000s either aged out of it and went on to live normal lives, or were too fucked to adapt to reality and are now still there in their 30s-40s. It got hollowed out by all this attrition and only the most mentally fucked remained to steer the course