On contemplation of Archive.org, I actually do agree with your first point. There wasn't 10 stories about the libertarian case du jour, but equally there wasn't

On contemplation of Archive.org, I actually do agree with your first point. There wasn't 10 stories about the libertarian case du jour, but equally there wasn't a flood of interesting compSci stories. I guess my memory is selective! >That makes no sense. Except if you take it to mean: the guys that were there earlier don't get what they like anymore, and more (and newer) people get it. Which is a pretty hipsterish sense ("Oh, that band was cool when only I liked it"). I really can't agree with this. In 10 (12?... Getting old I guess) years of online participation, I've seen time and time again relatively small forums and websites grow in user numbers and the quality of the popular submissions/threads/posts decline. Perhaps a good example is Reddit. At one point it was a site for submitting links to news articles. The userbase was fairly heavily skewed towards tech and programmers. Looking at Archive.org from 2007 the front page is perhaps 1/3 programming related, 1/3 "interest" articles and 1/3 current events. There's not a single link to an image. My belief is that when a site grows in popularity, and so the interests and backgrounds of the users expands, the posts that consistantly attract more interest or votes are those which appeal to the largest common aspect of the community - the community itself. Once Reddit was large enough to have its own in-jokes and themes, submissions related to those tended to receive lots of attention. I think many people enjoy belonging to online communities with injokes, and so once it started that shift the demographic of new users changed as well. In 2007 nobody would have strongly defined themselves as a "redditor" in the way that people do today because at that point it was nothing more than a site for sharing interesting news articles. As someone who enjoys reading thought provoking articles (and sometimes commenting on them), I find it frustrating to see websites I like move towards lowest-common-denominator submissions. I'm no fan of "it was better in my day" baseless nostalgia, but Archive.org provides us a fairly effective window into the past and it is clear that many sites are today demonstrably different than they were a few years ago. I don't think it's elitist (or "hipsterish") to want to maintain the spirit and submission quality that was the basis for this sites popularity.