1) With sub-reddits, this hasn't become as big of a problem unless a lot of users still keep the sub-reddits that annoy them. There is a reddit for everyone, especially since anyone can create their own sub-reddit. While Digg only had one idea tribe, Reddit has many. Moreover users that create their own sub-reddits can police them with other like-minded users.

2) Reddit is able to fit more content per page given their design. I don't have to keep clicking the next page link to get more.

But there's a tricky problem. Subreddits like /r/programming dominate, while more focused subreddits like /r/ruby (or whatever) languish. If I have a ruby link and I care at all about karma, I'm going to post it in /r/programming.

In your case, ruby already has a good news site and it doesn't need reddit. Rubyflow is more than sufficient imo

Call me an optimist, but I can't help but think that there's something better than what's out there now.

Well if there isn't, as I've already mentioned, you can make your own sub-reddit.

> Call me an optimist, but I can't help but think that there's something better than what's out there now.

hmmm you're right... Reddit's sub-reddit's is imo a half-assed implementation of an idea tribe paper that showed up years ago on HN. To this day I can't find it.

Anyways the gist of the idea, is that everyone belongs to an idea tribe / group aimed that making wikipedia better. All of these groups have differences in what they think are accurate, right, cool, etc... However many groups have things that they agree on. The paper talks about how great it would be if we could have something that would highlight those commonalities.

That doesn't mean anyone's going to use it. It takes a long time to grow a community. I would love for /r/trueskyrim to take off because /r/skyrim has become 99% garbage, 1% content. Unfortunately trueskyrim hasn't had a post in 6 months.

The only reason /r/Games ever took off was because it was started by the mods of /r/gaming and got lots of attention on /r/gaming's front page. Don't get me wrong /r/Games is wonderful, but without the publicity that it got from /r/gaming I doubt anyone would use it.

Why not seed it yourself for a few weeks and see what happens?

> The only reason /r/Games ever took off was because it was started by the mods of /r/gaming and got lots of attention on /r/gaming's front page.

It's not like you can't work with the mods of other sub-reddits. r/libertarian is on r/politic's sub-reddit page

That is 100% your own fault.

Anyone who's been on reddit long enough has a front page of all the sub communities they follow, and probably only a couple of the defaults.

The pop-culture types get the pop stuff and the veterans get the small, focused culture, so everyone's mostly satisfied.

When one community starts becoming watered down, someone will usually start a new subreddit, rather than go to a new site altogether.

Altogether, I think these will give reddit better longevity than slashdot/digg.

HN will be a great place to go to, so long as it is heavily (and transparently) moderated. Otherwise the hordes will come in, and destroy it with meme's and sensationalist articles.

If you're bothered by the community then just subscribe to subreddits. It's the same with Facebook. Any post that annoys you can be filtered with a few clicks. It's quite customizable.

Are you basing theory on anything except your personal dislike of regurgitated memes, nerd pop culture and rage comics?

As far as I can tell all evidence points to the fact that Digg was in fact killed by their version 4 release, it was widely disliked by their users and you can find articles about sharp drops of pageviews (never recovered) after that specific release and, IIRC, also articles about reddit gaining pageviews at the same time.