real talk: this forum is kind of boring without the icons around
I'm not entirely sure about that but if you check the stats for instance, May 2009 has been slower than May of 2007 and 2008. If I was an asspie, I'd make a few graphs to show the downward trend.
The Icons do most of the posting. Well, you could argue Methodis posts a lot but the content of his posts are so worthless that they should not be counted towards total post or thread creation counts. Now that many Icons are gone or cutting back on posting, times aren't just getting slower in perception, it is reality.