Nothing specifically I can disclose, but I can say that its been a lot of concerted effort to cleanup the forums over the past few years.
Pfft. *cough* Newcomer.
It was never really a secret that Cyberjock got hired by iX around 2014 which coincided with a shift in tone in his posts, plus a huge decrease in post volume. He made a brief reappearance here in the forums awhile later as js_level2 but for unknown reasons that was short-lived.
He was technically competent and very teachable, but he had a tendency to view things as very black and white. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it led to clashes especially with people who expected their hands to be held and the words to be gentle, and especially those who refused to acknowledge the advice. There's always been a large problem with here with newcomers who believe themselves expert in things that they are not, which has sometimes led to burnout by those of us trying to drag the horses to the water.
One of iX's early mistakes was moderator conscription (that is a carefully selected word) where some of us woke up one morning to find ourselves being moderators. This didn't help the situation. It would have been one thing to ask nicely. I clearly remember the period right before Cyberjock as a time where knowledgeable posters on the forum were very thin, and this wasn't a good situation. Cyberjock tried to make it his job to respond to almost everything, which was perhaps destined to result in stress and confrontationalism (which the OP refers to as snark and vitriol, which may not do it justice). You're welcome to view this through whatever lens you wish, but regardless of which one you pick, the fact of the matter is there was a bit of a void to fill.
From my own perspective, as someone who is on the far side of a career that saw the birthing of the commercial Internet, data centers, servers, the birth of FreeBSD, and many other interesting things, I enjoy bringing a professional's perspective to this and helping SOHO/hobbyist/drowning-professional-IT'ers get up to speed on FreeNAS. It's pleasant when things work out for someone or they have that "aha" moment. I don't always have the time to do that well, so I've also spent a lot of time trying to write technical stickies (now resources) in a manner that's accessible to newcomers.