[LinuxBender]

This reminds me of an episode of Southpark. Eventually everyone agreed that Walmart was too big for their town, so they burnt it down. Then a local business started getting bigger and all the problems moved to that business. So they burnt that one down.

I think anywhere that you have a community of people, you end up with the same issues when the site gets really big or popular. I do not believe that anyone has found a method that makes everyone happy, at least not yet.

I have long since stopped posting, answering or editing posts on ServerFault.

[daturkel]

I think the same thing happened with Digg -> Reddit. People got sick of Digg and moved to the underdog, which has since grown to be much bigger than Digg ever was (with the pros and cons of that growth).

I would argue that the platform itself is kind of screwed when they try to maintain quality at scale. SO has pretty heavy handed moderation (by SO and self-imposed by power users) whereas Reddit has in many ways remained very anything-goes (with some inevitable limitations), and both receive flak. I think finding the balance is much easier said than done when you're at that scale, which is why when a newcomer arrives with a much smaller user base it always seems so much better.

[LinuxBender]

I agree on heavy handed. Some fellow moderators were clearly power tripping and none of the site owners would discourage the behavior. There is also quite a bit of elitism.

[lonelappde]

People didn't "get sick" of digg. Diff abandoned it's users. Digg launched a big overhaul "v4" aimed at cheap impressions the drove people away.

[maps7]

Yeah, I didn't want to move away from Digg really. I wished they had just moved back to v3 or quickly introduced a v5. It feels like they just gave up. I would love to read something from Kevin Rose or someone else about what went down.