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Fundamental changes in the business. Being "an affiliate" as a primary business model was always fraught; the power imbalances are too large, the opportunities for the affiliate to be screwed are too many. In a fast-growing highly-competitive era, this was balanced by competition for affiliate traffic, and program reputation (among affiliates, especially on boards) was important, which limited the scope for programs to grasp and steal. Once the growth and competition went away, in a world of declining margin, too many programs (not all by any means, but vast majority) came to see the affiliate percentage as an unwelcome cost. Perceived affiliate value declined, temptation to steal (because hard times) went way up. Result? Strong pressure on affiliates to diversify into other business models, and (for those of us who retained affiliation as part of our model) vastly reduced incentive to participate on boards, because their primary value (social and tech conversation aside) was to keep the programs honest. That's gone now. Nobody's honest unless that's their actual business ethic (somewhat rare) and even they don't care about affiliate boards because affiliates are a much smaller chunk of their revenue. All this vastly oversimplifies, but it explains a big chunk of the change, in my opinion.
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