I think a lot of it can be attributed to this:
The majority of the people that made this site great are ones that are hands on, they go out and do stuff. They have the funny stories and general BS humor and great toilet humor, because they go out and experience and have real life shit going on. Now, the internet in general is being flooded with just, loser, never done anything themselves, internet warriors that spend all day on the computer, on a game console, and have really shitty humor, no actual stories themselves but "know" a guy or read something somewhere. They're the people looking at a small potion of the world, a tiny little spec, claiming to be some expert or acting like they're opinion matters. You get the internet filled with just fawking idoits, who just bitch and bitch, and cry and whine about fawking anything; and it just turns the good people, the funny ass story tellers, right off the internet. They have a tendency to just stop posting, and stop visiting places like this.
It turns it from a place to share a funny story, throw some BS around and laugh at each other; to filled with bitchy little douchbags that have nothing better to do than just fucking ruin any sort of fun. It's the same thing with a cool bar that gets flooded with hipsters. Nobody likes hipsters, hipsters don't like hipsters.
I don't think thats the only reason, but I think that's a pretty big one. Another reason, nobody likes change; people liked that this site was local owned, local administered. Selling the site to a big corporation, then slowing this site becoming more and more corporate just kills it. Like now. This is not the site that people grew up on; the visual aspect of the whole site change, on top of the diminishing visitor and regular members is just the nail in the coffin to prove that this site isn't what people loved.
To the people that are complaining (myself included) about how the admins change this site to be the same and expect people to stay here.....the admins don't care. They don't care because they don't have too; the influx of the internet lifers means that no matter what an admin does or how much it changes, there will always be people coming through to make them money. The people not accepting the change aren't the ones that matter, on the internet. The ones that matter are the one that I spoke about before, the ones that do nothing put post and spend all day on some sort of internet site or social media.