Item — HN Reader

I'm not 100% sure how I feel about it, but this is my first impression:

Reddit is a service that has truly created a community. And a community isn't just the good, it is the bad. For every bus driver being tormented that is saved with kickstarter story, you can find one where a user is being pestered and encouraged to commit suicide by trolls, or things like the Boston Marathon manhunt.

I feel as if the Reddit community is hitting a point of critical mass where one of two things are going to happen:

1. It becomes much more segmented, with specific subreddits disregarding interaction between users who generally stick to a few specific few, and these communities do well because they are now the size of what used to be entire large chunks of Reddit.

2. Reddit will fail to deliver enough new features fast enough to justify the spending, and it will result in many feeling slighted and we could see a digg-esque migration of users to some other service X that pops up.

Personally I have stopped using reddit as much as I used to, because I generally only peruse the programming and ruby/rails and clojure sections. Most of the stories I see posted are already on HN and have better discussion here. However, I am obviously a very specific case and the reddit userbase is quite widespread now that it has gotten so popular.

It really will be interesting to watch.

To be honest, your issue number one is basically how I think the site is supposed to work in the first place. It didn't take very long (even before the Digg influx) for the default subreddits to become just a sea of people where any discussions are both hard to have and difficult to read. However, the site gets infinitely better if you forego any of the default subreddits and you take the time to seek out all your areas of interest, and you cultivate a set of subreddits where the dialog matches your personal style and preferences. I think it's not a bad thing if the community segments, especially if a large portion of the overall community is not people you're interested in interacting with anyway...

I think Reddit has a huge longevity advantage over sites like the aforementioned Digg exactly because of the subreddits. You can consume as much or as little of the community as you want to and carve out an experience that suits your own tastes. With Digg, you either accepted the community as a whole, or you left...