it's far simpler than that - social news sites like reddit and hn have 'fads' - surges of interest in a topic that involve lots of people posting about it, a bu

it's far simpler than that - social news sites like reddit and hn have 'fads' - surges of interest in a topic that involve lots of people posting about it, a bunch of debate, and then a dying off of attention as people move to the next fad. it's not even anything new; the same thing happened on Usenet back in the day, and probably on bbses before that, and in newspaper letter pages even earlier.