People were saying it 12 years ago too.

Note that it may actually be true. One way to look at it is all successful organizations and communities are continually dying. In order for an organization to get critical mass and start attracting people, it has to be far above the mean in quality; the mean idea, after all, never gets realized. After that, everything is regression to the mean, i.e. downwards, until it ceases to exist.

We've been saying it since long before slashdot, even.

When you have a mirror, you can shine light wherever you want.

People also frequently complained about new users upvoting the wrong content. So they made /classic, which only counts votes from accounts of a certain age. It used to look quite different from the front page. Now it’s basically the same.