"I wonder if this is the eventual fate of all online communities. I've been through at least half a dozen now, and I've yet to see one survive as something other than trite, meaningless bullshit."

This is best described as "reversion to the mean". A democratic, non-moderated site like Reddit and News.YC will start off attracting folks on the right end of the bell curve, and over time, gain traction to attract the unwashed masses. Then, someone will get fed up and go start another site, and the cycle begins anew. I'm not being elitist or snobbish; this is what I have observed since the USENET of the 1990s. It always happens.

On the other hand, I've been a member of a loosely-moderated community for close to 7 years and it's still going strong (I think the forum first opened in 1999). There is a lot of what might be considered "trite" to a casual observer, but for those of us who have been reading and posting there for a long time we simply ignore the content we're not interested in. There's always enough good stuff to keep me going back.

It definitely was never overrun with ignoranuses, at least not for any extended period of time.

I still visit proggit regularly. Actually, that's how I found out about the change since I had stopped visiting "Startup News" for the same reasons pg changed it.

Most content on Reddit seems to be generated by about 5 people who either post as much as they can from whatever feeds they're subscribed to or whatever pulls people's strings. At the moment this is usually stories about how the cops are utterly corrupt and how Fox news totally sucks.

Why? It's not like they discuss the story or you actually get prizes for a high karma?

Nowadays I prefer finding a page edited by someone who shares similar interests as me e.g. boingboing or hackaday. Otherwise things just degenerate into "FUNNAY PIC [LOL!]" quickly.

Maybe rather than have a single pool of submitted stories, you could chose whose stories show up on your page.

You can. Go to your preferences, click on 'friends', and add the nicknames of all the posters you like. Then go to friends.reddit.com, and you'll only see submissions from those people. This feature came out about a half a year ago, IIRC.

Hot links are great for discussion as many people will see them. But perhaps not many will interest you.

Personalized links (assuming personalization works well) would come closer to your interests, but there may be few people to discuss them with.

And so one might consider a way to allow users to pick some point between these two extremes that they would be happy with.

"People who complain about the content on reddit and yet never submit a thing, need to keep quiet or contribute something other than complaints to the community."

http://reddit.com/goto?id=2gq14

love the newly coined word and its etymology :)

It's not actually mine. I read it in some newspaper article about neologisms, and it appears in several places on the web (including 17 urbandictionary references).

email Safire stat. Gotta get him on the case.