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I have the feeling reddit is more like reconstructive surgery than actually something totally new being born.

SA is definitely past its influential period, but to this day stuff that starts in 4chan ends up in national news.

You don't say that a scientist lacks influence based on his/her current papers, or even based on whether they're currently alive.

What we do now is based on SA, 4chan then. Reddit is the influence of those sites, it didn't eclipse them, it amplified them. The part of reddit that isn't SA and 4chan is pretty much Digg, which is why censorship of even the most horrific speech represents an existential threat to the company.