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Comment by Kilimanjaro | Hacker News Reader

I went from slashdot to digg to reddit to HN.

Like an old disco, no matter how many times you remodel the dance floor people already found the hippest place around the corner.

And they're not coming back...

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So in a year the market will be ripe for a new player.

I like your analogy, but...

A website, unlike a disco, can make tons of money off the unwashed masses. In fact, Digg can probably make more off the masses who remain than the "hip" crowd who founded/left the site.

Clubs do well financially when they go mainstream. It means much more liquor sales. This is a lot like websites who also love it for increased ad sales. The problem is that the masses do eventually tire of the same club. That, or they simply get older and move on to do other things. Because the club is no longer the cool place, there are no/fewer replacements for the existing clientele who are shrinking.

The problem with Digg is its a social spot and subject to the same dynamics as clubs. Going mainstream isn't a problem. It's what they do afterward that is. Not to worry, just like in real life, the owners will make bank, leave/sell the old spot to naive buyers who think it'll be a good buy. They will then start something new. This happens all the time with entrepreneurs in similar industries like clubs and restaurants.

Had the same thing except I found out about reddit from HN. On occasion I will still checkout reddit is sort of like those grocery checkout magazines, not going to read it for long but it passes time when your bored.

It's not really right to think of "reddit" as a monolithic site anymore. The default front page is garbage. The old programming reddit is fluffy with occasional good stuff, but making good comments without getting them modded to hell has become difficult because it's pretty much numerically dominated by inexperienced programmers now who don't want to hear any suggestions that they may not already know everything. The forked-off "coding" reddit (in rebellion to the crappification of the programming reddit) is pretty good in content, seems to have attained a critical mass, haven't played with the comments much. Some of the language-specific reddits are pretty good, too. Science has tanked hard ("hurr hurr religious people are teh dumb" is not actually science) and if anyone knows a "real-science" reddit I'd be interested to hear about it.

Check out http://www.reddit.com/r/hardscience That might be what you are looking for.

yeah, same. i think a lot of us had this news site journey

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