>>1434342The influx of phoneposters around that time was the start of the steepest decline, yeah, but it was going downhill well before that.
First major decline in quality was circa the 2008 election, where there was a steep but short permanent drop in quality, then it kinda coasted. Then the 2012 election saw another steep drop in quality but continued a less-steep decline. Coincidentally both of these line up well with iphone releases. Then the 2016 election saw a HUGE spike in traffic, almost all of which was mobile (phoneposters fuck it up again), and quality literally fell through the floor overnight and kept plummeting down through the basement and further, to where we are today where the "serious" post to troll/spam post ratio is probably 1:100,000 site-wide.
