I've always heard the Bulbagardens was awful, a lot of people fled there to register to Serebii some years back, but most of
those folks have also left because, well, toxicity spreads. Even if they didn't carry it over themselves, there's a bit of an overlap with the mods and everything that happens at the top makes its way down.
They also have a place specifically for debate on political issues
The debate subforum is practically dead lol no one wants to go in there anymore, so that's become a hugbox, too. But it's an
obvious hugbox, so that's why people avoid it like the plague, at least I remember it began dying/getting its negative reputation once Dattebayo got banned (he would post a lot of stupid shit in Debates, so it was popular to gang up on him there). The U.S. politics thread used to be engaging, but Serebii's biggest conservative, BigLutz, left because of real life around 2014, and it soon devolved into your typical political faggotry and around 2017 I believe (it was around the time of the 2016 elections) had to be moved to Miscellaneous Polls because it attracted the most "spammers" there to boost their postcount. With the removal of post ranks making the move obsolete, now it doesn't matter, but the politics thread has become a TDS hugbox only a small handful of likeminded posters have been posting in since 2018.
Also far as I can tell, the subforum's death knell first rang with the pornography thread ten years ago and that devolved into a shitstorm
real fast, oh my God in hindsight that was actually amazing to watch in real time. Once that was locked (
it might've been deleted with Ethan's rampage, I haven't checked EDIT: Nope, it lived! 19 pages.), sometime afterward they enacted a new rule in which sure, you can submit a new thread, but then it
had to get moderation approval in order to show up. It was small, but it discouraged a lot of new threads from being made, and so they dropped that rule around 2013. But even then, if the topic didn't "adhere to the rules/right mindset", it was locked or just died/was ripped apart, so only "hot button" topics got activity, and even then the debates went out of control. So once BigLutz left, the subforum's infrastructure weakened drastically, and with Trump's election, it soon crumbled in on-itself and is just rubble now.
This is the first page of the debate forum by starting date for a good idea of how dead it is:
Keeping the starting date enabled, by page five you start seeing threads from 2014. It was a trickle-down.