[morrow]

I don't think abandoning the discussion model is the right answer, I think it just needs to get better. All of these communities seem to follow a simple principle: they grow in size until their ability to self-filter, self-organize, and maintain community valuse is compromised by a volume of traffic or overall size of membership larger than they are capable of handling. The latest batch of discussion sites and tools (reddit, news.yc, digg, /., etc.) are simply the latest and best models of a continuously growing and improving application space.

I think the only way for a "community" to exist long term in this space is to either continue advancing the state of it's filtering tools in order to handle the increased load, or not, and let it naturally degrade back into a smaller community and just exist at the level that it is capable of filtering (though this is not as simple as a community capable of holding X users will always have X users -- momentum and network effects are definitely important here).