The Decline of Reddit, Hacker News, and the United States
The United States is now full of people who haven’t read a book since high school, think Jesus is coming back soon, don’t believe in evolution, and don’t know the name of their congressional representatives. And Hacker News is becoming more like Reddit every day.
As opposed to, say, 1885, when everyone read books, nobody thought Jesus was coming back soon, everyone believed in evolution, and everyone knew who their congressional representatives were (although maybe not their Senators, who they couldn't elect).
Point being, it's easy to idealize or even mythologize the past.
These sites are all slowly turning into their right-hand side neighbor. I suppose /b/ will always be /b/.Next cool thing > Hacker News > Reddit > Digg > Youtube comments > /b/Linkbait title, but I agree with the sentiment. It's the same phenomenon that occurs in the real world. Artists, entrepreneurs and other creatives create interesting cultural centers in low-rent areas, which leads to "trendiness" and gentrification, which leads to a yuppie influx which eventually kills off the vibe, drives up the rent and pushes the artists and entrepreneurs to another part of town.
Having said that, I'm not sure what you can do about it without creating a walled garden.
I have a slightly different take on the cause for this phenomena - I called it a pond theory because it reminded me of ripples in a pond. Essentially, a small, founding group have a lot in common, though each individual has diverse interests.
The community expands, and while new ripples will continue to have things in common with the centre, they will increasingly have interests that are more diverse than other new members on the other side of the pond.
Eventually the community grows too large, there are too many interests for the original core to remain strong, and (like the ripples in a pond) the energy dissipates and the group fails.
[1] Thoughts - http://www.shirlawsonline.com/blogs/197-my-pond-theory-or-wh...
[2] Possible Solutions - http://www.shirlawsonline.com/blogs/199-my-pond-theory-or-ho...
And for the record, I don't think HN is already too much like Reddit / Digg / Slashdot / Whatever.
You, too, will get old. And when you do, you'll fantasize that when you were young prices were reasonable, politicians were noble and children respected their elders.
http://kids.niehs.nih.gov/lyrics/graduation.htm
Change happens. Accept it and move on. There are worse fates than getting popular - anyone remember kuro5hin?
Social organization should be harder to solve than finding dark energy and higgs bosons. It's a massively complex problem.
Walled gardens grow stale, progressive communities fall apart. That's the natural order of things. The best thing to do is make this process smoother. Have those magic members of the community leave earlier by starting new and better communities at a faster pace.
Maybe you don't need to rewrite backends every time. Just modernize the look, add some features like autofollow based on friend follow graph and see if it works. Maybe just split the community into smaller groups, that occasionally trickle out into a central group, something that Digg 4 is attempting.