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I wonder if today's new reddit users see it as we once did? As a source for learning rather than entertainment. And in two years, will their complaints be the

• thaumaturgy 12y ago
  Anecdotally, this seems to be true on both Reddit and HN. I occasionally see HN users pop along who say, "well, HN just isn't what it used to be," and I look at their user page and find that their account is three years old. It's possible that they're on their second or third account, but context usually implies that they've just been using the site for around three years. Ditto on Reddit. I was a regular reader of the site before it had comments. There's a frequent complaint among Reddit's users that it's not as good as it used to be, and usually the reasons they give for that are all things that have happened in just the last couple or few years. If you say for example, "yeah, Reddit really declined when pun threads became popular", most folks don't know what you're talking about it. It makes me wonder if it's a psychological phenomenon, that things look inherently more valuable when they're new. That might be one explanation for the recent popularity of all of these social networks that focus most of all on what's new. (Facebook, HN, Twitter, Reddit... these all work fundamentally different from traditional online forums.)