Religion.

I wasn't here in 2008, but seems to me that the emphasis of this site is moving from articles to comments. Articles are usually better than comments. People put more work into articles, and as a reward for this work, the article becomes more visible, and the successful articles are well remembered and hyperlinked. Article creates a separate page where one main topic is explored. If necessary, more articles may explore the same topic, creating a sequence. Even some "articles" today don't have the qualities of the classical article. Some of them are just a question / a poll / a prompt for discussion / a reminder for a meetup. Some of them are just placeholders for comments (open thread, group rationality) -- and personally I prefer these, because they don't polute the article-space. Essentially we are mixing together "article" paradigm and a "discussion forum" paradigm. But these are two different things. Article is a higher quality piece of text. Discussion forum is just a structure of comments, without articles. Both have their place, but if you take a comment and call it "article", of course it seems that the average quality of articles deteriorates. Assuming this analysis is correct, we don't need much of a technical fix, we need a semantic fix; that is: the same software, but different rules for posting. And the rules nees to be explicit, to avoid gradual spontaneous reverting. * "Discussion" for discussions: that is, for comments without a top-level article (open thread, group rationality, meetups). It is not allowed to create a new top-level article here, unless the community (in open thread discussion) agrees that a new type of open thread is needed. * "Articles" for articles: that is for texts that meet some quality treshold -- that means that users should vote down the article even if the topic is interesting, if the article is badly written. Don't say "it's badly written, but the topic is interesting anyway", but "this topic deserves a well-written a