No, it can't without everybody leaving, but they will all leave anyway. My theory is that social news is like the popular club in a major city or a fad in popul

No, it can't without everybody leaving, but they will all leave anyway. My theory is that social news is like the popular club in a major city or a fad in popular culture. You can't predict which will be a hit or for how long. What you can predict is that eventually when enough people show up that it will lose that quality that made it so interesting to begin with, and the people that made it special will move on. This happened with slashdot, digg, and maybe a bit to Hacker News too. I think Reddit's subreddits have made it more of a community of communities instead of one monolithic thing, with a monolithic front page. That certainly helps it have some legs. However, I really don't see how any fad can sustain itself over the long term and anything that is built on social communities is at the whim of the movement of social opinion and interest. People change, get older, and what made something cool for one generation doesn't necessarily work for another generation. There is no reason that Reddit should be popular as opposed to any other community site other than it's where people are congregating right now. In 5 or 10 years, where will people congregate online?