Early on (before I even signed up and was just a lurker):
1. It was pre TBS, so Gman and ZionsLion were on here all of the time, among many people that made it a lot more interesting.
2. During that period, it was the dark Crowton years. The team was very bad at times, so many of the people that were on here were those die hard fans. Made the discussion much, much better.
3. There were a lot less 14 year olds on the board. Not sure if most of the people who I think are really 14, but not sure it really matters.
4. The arrogance and narcisism on anonymous chat boards has exploded. CB is not unique in this regard.
5. A lot of posters that were great to have around, have been permanently banned. My personal favorite was landpoke. That guy was hilarious. He had some great non- mormon posts. Then the dweebs increased exponentially and chased him off - pretty sure he may be permanently banned due to "taking the bait" and reacting to the dweebs. There are many others that have been banned. A lot of them hang out over at cougaruteforum. However, the narcisism on that board is even greater than on CB, but they are much less juvenile.
6. Too many people have to start a new thread instead of adding to a thread two or three threads down on the same subject. This narcisism added behavior reduces the enjoyment of the board IMO.
7. The negativity, the ridiculous criticism (e.g., "TH is an idiot") - stuff like that just sucks the life out of the enjoyment of being on CB some days.
8. The saying that you can answer any question and fill any need on CB was always kind of funny, but had some truth to it. So many new posts happen now that if you try to get some information on a subject, it slides off the front page so fast, mainly because we have 52 redundant, sequential starting posts (each) of "Riley versus Heaps", "Independence sucks", "the BYU admin are idiots", and it is hard to find a single interesting post with a new thought or a new subject.