Oh please.
People around here have always believed what they wanted to believe. The "quality of a post" has never changed anyone's opinion around here. It has always been less of a discussion, and more of an exchange of personal opinions.
Why engage in "valuable discussion" if youre not going to change anyone's mind, anyway? Why write a well researched and formulated 2,000 word essay if the first reply is some meme gif getting 20 TPs?
This, of course, is part of a broader issue where we all stopped accepting facts as facts and simply started to pick and choose the arguments that support our already held beliefs, a behaviour you can see in basically every political thread in the Current Events sub-forum.
Tommy Points have always been group think points and not a reward for effort, and in the same vein, what you consider the "quality of posts" has always been an exercise in using many words to tell you what you want to hear. This forum, like pretty much every forum on the planet, has always been full of low effort posts.
If you think this used to be different, it only means that people have stopped telling you what you want to hear. I think people are using this forum as their personal Celtics safe space, and now that there's overwhelming, inescapable evidence that the Celtics are not who you thought they were, these low effort posts telling you that you're wrong simply stick out more to you.