I find it interesting how high quality niche sites drop in rankings and are suddenly way harder to find. On the other side, if you ar elooking for stuff you see these spam sites covering the first 2-3 pages of search results. It has definitely become harder to find the useful stuff and easier to get trapped in bad content.
For my own site, I noticed a drop of about 30% of visitors. Not that I had a lot visitors the first place, but as niche site it is extremely important to at least show up in these niches. But the sites you find now are those huge pages and forums which don't give researched, tested valuable data, jsut people looking for the same stuff than what you ar elooking for or stuff you posted on your site but hardly gets clicks at the later pages.

myrddin.de since 1997 :D