Because categories helped destroy Reddit?

/r/lisp is the only section I read and it's devoid of stupid jokes and multipage puns.

/r/programming would be cool if it wasn't full of naive pre-undergraduates. (why do those people find everything "interesting"?)

/r/programming has this sort of questions: "Kripke Semantics of Computational Tree Logic is hard, can someone teach me" .. Of course, they don't tell the guy to go fuck himself and get a library membership at the local uni, so they all take turns explaining in 140 characters entire fields, all while doing ASCII-math with the Reddit equivalent of BBCode. Amidst all this crowd-teaching, someone will come in and crack a Bush joke, get upvoted a few thousands points, and all the replies will be puns about temporal logic, atheism, weed and George Bush.

Sad.

It's not so bad if you subscribe to a small number of narrow focus sub-reddits, like hard science, C++, Math, etc.

Which creates hard science and C++ reddit communities at the expense of a general reddit community ("reddit" is an epithet here), when the general HN vibe is the reason many of us are here.

"At the expense of" is an interesting way of putting it, aren't we all here specifically because HN is more exclusive with a more select group of users? Aren't exclusivity and selectivity the very goals we seek? And isn't HN becoming truly popular and thus generic and shallow exactly what we seek to prevent?