Being "alive" and having "good quality" are two different things. Sometimes, I go to Development & Technical Discussion and I can see some great topics, which I would never expect. And sometimes, I go there, and see nothing interesting.

A good example is when puzzle solvers try to find patterns in pseudorandom numbers, without understanding, what a hash function is, how it works, and where exactly they should look, if they want to optimize anything. If they compare first bits of RIPEMD-160, then they are wrong, because they should focus on different chunks. Even for SHA-256, the proper way is looking at the last bits, and not the first ones, because of endianness. The "real" hash of the Genesis Block is done after hashing af42031e805ff493a07341e2f74ff58149d22ab9ba19f61343e2c86c71c5d66d into 6fe28c0ab6f1b372c1a6a246ae63f74f931e8365e15a089c68d6190000000000.

Quite the opposite: many people produced a lot of useless posts, just because they were paid for quantity, and not for quality. If they would make 2x or 3x less posts, and spend the same amount of time writing it, then they could have better quality.

And if you don't see the problem, then you can compare it with places like mailing list, or even Delving Bitcoin. In the old times, many developers wrote on bitcointalk. Today, most of them are no longer here. Guess why.

Meriting a post is not a sign of agreement with the author. It is simply a signal, that a given post is not a spam. I sent a lot of merits to people I disagree with.