The Digg implosion is the worst thing that happened to reddit, as a community.
I don't use reddit anymore because I found it to be an unproductive use of my time, but that doesn't mean it's bad. Youtube, for all of the stupidity of its comments, has nonetheless grown a fairly tight community of people who interact with each other through videos. Wikipedia, for all its politicking and acrimony, has a very tight community of core contributors. Reddit's community isn't the same as it used to be, true. It's much larger and much broader in appeal. Sure, that means I'm not as enamoured of it as I once was, but it's hardly a death knell. In every measurable way, reddit is doing better than it ever has.
http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/17913/reddit_now...
I think this is just a necessary byproduct of our need to find patterns in events and relate current experiences to past ones. Rather than saying, "the dynamic on this site is changing from something familiar to something new", we always feel the need to compare it to some past experience. Thus, techies are always looking for "the next microsoft", calling g+ "the next facebook", looking for the next Netscape Moment, and so on. It seems to be a very deeply-ingrained need for us to cast entities and experiences as being reminiscent of those we've had before. I'm sure this is an instinct that is usually very beneficial, but boy howdy does it ever cause an inordinate amount of kvetching on the tubes.
I particularly like the subreddits that aim for better signal/noise ratio from the get-go and the good folks that help police them. One particularly outstanding fellow is blackstar9000, mod, creator, and prolific poster/commenter of several nice niche subreddits who has helped keep things in line. If there's any one who deserves some kudos in that regard, I'd nominate him/her for the honor.
I think that's what the issue is here. For people who have been part of a community for a long time it is painful to see this migration away from the core values you once thought the community stood for. In my opinion, "the desires of the masses changed" is just another way of saying that the community got hijacked by a wave of new users who didn't value what the entrenched users valued. This is, I think at least in a way, similar to a show jumping the shark.