No, they aren't equivalent, and I'm not advocating those things. I said it could be a problem for HN. There's a difference between fragmentation of a community

No, they aren't equivalent, and I'm not advocating those things. I said it could be a problem for HN. There's a difference between fragmentation of a community because of site structure and people going elsewhere because they like it better. In building a community, the choices of the designer of the community's home influences the structure of the resulting community without needing to tell them explicitly to do one thing or another. My original point was not to say I agreed or disagreed with the post's plea to stop fragmentation, though it seems that you took it that way. I was saying that your original point of adding more options being inconsequential because there are lots of sites out there was an oversimplified trivialization of the problem. Too many options on a site is frequently a real, important design problem, and you shouldn't dismiss it out of hand. Having HN1, HN2, HN3, etc is different from having HN, Digg, Reddit, etc. I'm done. I didn't mean to get into an argument, I was just pointing out something you didn't seem to be considering when you made your comment. HN's existence as a single entity might be an intentional design decision, and it's not necessarily a bad one.