I'm also sceptical of the claim that the site is becoming less vanilla and more "degenerate", but unless we get hard data of what the site looked like 5 years ago, and compare it to the situation today, that's never going to move beyond a gut feel.
Something we
can do, at least, is look at the current situation.
Here are the 10 stories published in the past 90 days that have the greatest chapter depth (117 to 31). Themes, in order:
- Accidentally a God: isekai fantasy, no fetishes mentioned in tags or chapter titles
- The Luck Runs Out: fantasy, lists all the fetishes, including m/f dom/sub, power play, enf, bodymod, genderbending, spanking, brainwashing
- Mana Farming in Anime Worlds: isekai, no tags, but seems vanilla
- New Family Life: incest, obviously, but mentions that the PC wants to "protect" the his family, so unlikely to feature extreme content
- Diamond Girl: superhero? No fetishes mentioned, but seems consensual judging from chapter titles
- Into the Game: sci-fi'ish genderbending and more
- Mommy Fucks a Bully: NTR, likely includes msub (as in "forced to watch") and fsub (as in "forced to undergo") content
- The Method: consensual BDSM
- Absolute Control: The Bald Telepath: "subtle hypnosis content"
- Desire, Revisited: straight "you're special and can do whatever you want" power fantasy, long list of fetishes including ws, exhib, spank, handholding, ENF, transformations, gloryhole
Doing the same by sorting by most viewed, and skipping stories that I already listed above:
- Wanna Bet?: people have to accept all bets. Some tags: mc, spank, FFM, cuck
- It's live: make streamers do what you want. No tags, but chapter titles suggest various fantasy transformations (ie. not gender)
- Vacation Fun: mind control power fantasy story, chapter titles additionally suggest mdom and humiliation
- Image Caption Story: various seemingly-unrelated stories, seems pretty vanilla
- Compound BM-b0: transformations, particularly women to bimbos and men to "raging bulls"
- Given Names: mdom mind control harem story. Tags list a bunch of fetishes, including extreme ones like ws.
So which of these count as "degenerate"? Well, that depends on your tolerance for such content, I guess. Mine is pretty high, but if I try to look at the list through a more mainstream vanilla lens, I'd say from the first list: 2, 6, 7, and 10; and from the second: 1, 2, 3, 5, and 6, for 9/16.
I was surprised 2 of the 16 recent popular/active stories feature watersports. That's hardly mainstream, even in porn/erotica, but it seems like it is less of a niche thing than I thought.
Less surprising to me is the number of straight-up power fantasy stories: 9 and 10 from the first list, and 1, 2, 3, and 6 from the second, or 6/16, which also accounts for the majority of the "degenerate" stories (5/9). These appear to be the stroke stories of the 2020s: congratulations, you are now omnipotent, go fuck everyone you meet. (I don't like them, if that wasn't obvious.

)
And one final, more personal data point: I'm currently writing and publishing a pretty vanilla (but incestuous) storyline, after a 6 month break, and I'm getting about 40% more daily views now than before the break.
So my take-away is this: there is certainly plenty of "degenerate" content on the site... but vanilla stories are alive and well, and if that's what you want to write, there are plenty of people out there who will be happy to read it.