All this talk about BRF's demise is quite funny. Here's my perspective: BRF is sustained by the producers, not the consumers and bystanders.
I'm not an original member, having joined sometime in 2000, then lost my ID and registered again with my current stamp of 2002. The place was incredibly over-moderated then. Never mind having some idle talk, getting off thread topic invited immediate and harsh moderation. Entire topics of discussion (e.g. econ that every refers about me now - thanks!) basically did not exist. There was an econ thread, I think. But it was just news articles posted once a while, and barely moved. You thought very carefully before you posted, because if you posted something off topic or just stupid, your post disappeared, you got kicked out, or both.
My own role there to have built up and sustained the econ thread and various other TEF threads around it. I liked looking at forward projections. So ramana made me create PPTs (!!) from the
original BRIC paper, and the
NIC global trends documents . I went to BRF meetings, ramana, Arun_S, Kaushal, Acharya etc cross-examined me after that PPTgiri. Back then (2003-05) our economy was 1/5th of what it is now. We were puny by any measure you looked at. But there was a lot of change on the horizon.
Simultaneously, a few of us (e.g. Singha) went around taking pics of the the new Delhi Metro, and the Golden Quadrilateral in its early stages of construction. Infrastructure is key to development. We posted pics in various places. I was one of the founding participants of
Skyscrapercity India forum. I couldn't sustain the kind of visual output that site has now, but you'll find my pictures and posts in the very earliest editions of the road and rail threads there.
What that effort helped me learn was inspiring. The research and digging was fun. It opened our eyes to what was about to happen with a great degree of likelihood. Not just 'ek din', but quite accurate projections we were able to track over the years, and find data supporting that growth level. Some of it sounded fantastic then. Our annual aggregate trade is north of $1 trillion now. Back then it was 10% of that, even our GDP was a loooong way from a trillion then. It was difficult to visualize evolving that much, just 3-4 cricket world cups cycles out.
This kind of effort sustains BRF. I've tried to impart this enthusiasm to others. It doesn't usually work. Some folks are particularly disappointing (I won't name names) I've gone so far as to encourage a track of research with what would take little more than entering offered search terms into googal chacha, to get some data to discuss. But no, people simply don't want to bother. It's not lack of time . There's plenty of time to be had when it's just posting weakly supported arguments and lots of emotion, that could be so much more focused if they take time to find support material .
Then there are those who aren't particularly keen on any serious posting, and are simply there for the community. That's fair enough, but rather sad. Yes, there was a big community for you to interact with. That community was *built* by the efforts of the producers, who created enough material of value to bring so many interested people to one place. So many like minded people didn't end up in one place by random accident.
Those who moan about what's been 'lost' , need to humbly consider some things for themselves. Were you a producer or mostly a consumer/community member ? Were you there just to vent and socialize, or to actually lead the place forward ? You don't *need* to lead. But are you keeping it easy for the place to maintain direction, focus and its reputation ? Were you aware that some folks were producing the bulk of the output that drove the forum's reputation, and ensured you either stayed out of their way, fed something useful, or at least avoided getting in the way, or even report or attempt to keep others from disrupting ? All of this is not 'somebody else's job'. It's everyone's job.
Having limitations in knowledge, interest or intent, in itself is not a problem. We all have limitations. Not being aware of your own limitations and consequences of actions, and disrupting the place is. BRF, like a company, has the 80-20 rule in operation, i.e. 80% gets done by 20% of active participants. When the remaining 80% progressively take up more moderation energy and disrupt rather that feed the work of the rest, what happens in companies also happens in forums - the high value folks leave. When that happens, the place withers.
Moaning about BRF here is like a bunch of folk sitting around moaning about Kodak or Polaroid or some other entity. Except that in this case it's well within every involved person's ability to help keep the forum pointed the right way and to let it grow.