The problem that HN faces is the fact that as social news aggregators become larger and larger the quality and type of user changes. To enforce this we have fla

The problem that HN faces is the fact that as social news aggregators become larger and larger the quality and type of user changes. To enforce this we have flagging and removal of content. The problem with this aggregators is enforcement and policing doesn't scale. Also, as the aggregator becomes larger people want to discuss more and more topics. Personally I would rather have a HN that doesn't have politically charged topics. Although some of those topics are relevant to the community if we start letting more and more political topics then we can have factions of users and once that starts HN won't be fun to read anymore. Reddit attempted to solve this through subreddits but that didn't work. Slashdot used moderation. Digg died because they released a new version. I suppose either the censorship or the flagging and removal of political topics and otherwise will be the thing that eliminates HN. I think that any social news aggregator has a shelf life and you can't keep it from degrading to either something you hate and or something that doesn't serve the people who run the site.