To be perfectly fair, at this point reddit is kinder to my intelligence than this place. Atleast reddit trashes hyperbole with full malice and no class. This place seems to humor it too often.
My point here is that it's difficult to maintain that core membership purely through aggregation instead shared interests and expertise. In other words, the quality really comes from the people involved and not the technology for aggregating external links. For me, my go to discussion group was 9fans, which is pretty quiet these days. If I really wanted to find interesting things to talk about, I'd seek out those involved individuals, who of course haven't gone away, but just moved on to other things. I get the feeling that in the age of Twitter and Google Plus, news will become centered around people, and that aggregation sites will go the way of phpBB.
Perhaps I'm in the minority regarding my next quibble, but: I don't care about web start-ups. At least, I'm not employed by one, and I don't care to know exactly what Jeff Bezos is thinking __right now__. I like Hacker News for its capacity to impart that fascinating tidbit about technological advances, exciting advances in physics and science, and DIY articles from embedded projects to mathematical nuggets.
Since its decline as an icon, Slashdot is much less interesting than the news section that begins each issue of Science magazine, or any issue of Physics Today. What about Phys.org? Why does it have such a terrible reputation here? Admittedly, the comments were why I always went to Slashdot, and Phys.org comments seem to be made mostly by amateurs and spectators with too much time on their hands (think: armchair Star Trek physicists).
I'm not the only one feeling this way. See these Google Plus posts: https://plus.google.com/116810148281701144465/posts/h95SSbSJ... https://plus.google.com/114765095157367281222/posts/VfmNKPBd...