I'll be perfectly honest: the overall quality of B12 forums content and userbase has not changed measurably in the time I've been here, except for a slow bleed-off of old-timers who were genuinely thoughtful and interesting people. The perpetual cycle of someone pushing too far and being banned every few weeks has been regular for years.
I suppose it's also time for me to stop being an arse and be a reasonable mediator instead for about two lines again: You might disagree with someone. They might hold a view that's utterly anathema to your own perspective. That doesn't mean that they're a douchebag or an uneducated shithead (those would come, respectively, from: their expression of that view, their objective support for it, and their expression of it), but rather that they aren't you and don't mindlessly agree when other people tell them what they should think believe. I'm making no statement about whether a given person occupies the moral high ground, whether their opinion is fair or well-supported, &c. Just that it's intellectually dangerous to start genuinely condemning other people as shitlords who deserve to be censored because they disagree with you, rather than because their mode of address is atrocious and personally insulting (for example).
In fact, I might go so far as to call it problemati-*is shot*