Honestly Digg can not be mentioned enough times here, what Reddit did with the re-design almost feels like opt-in/wilful self-destruction. Is there a point somewhere in there that once a platform becomes a powerhouse, in terms of democratic user behaviour & numbers, that platform is in turn basically forced into auto-destruct since the risks of having a sudden functional democracy the size of a small nation state is basically too disruptive to current world order/system?
Maybe it's that once a platform achieves a certain size then the potential of making real money comes into view, and that starts to be the objective to optimize for. That means employing typical short-sighted stock boosting strategies such as explicitly focusing on revenue (Digg), or targeting mass appeal. Only the masses do not produce very good content, and they overwhelm the initial users in numbers by an order of magnitude. So the quality of the platform goes to shit.
Once a platform becomes big enough I'd imagine you're guaranteed a regression to the mean. Your user persona becomes "everyone" so you design for "everyone" instead of the community that made the site unique. I'd imagine this is especially true if your leadership changes out after some sort of monetary event and you start looking at your typical metrics like new users onboarded, or DAU, rather than continuing to do new things.
I'm imagining all this because I've never done it, and it must be hard to do it and certainly impossible to please this crowd anyway, but I can see how it happens.
There's only so many people any interesting/unique platform can pull in, because the same features that attract some people repel others. So such platforms eventually plateau, no matter how much you push engagement.
But, given a platform that gets big enough before it plateaus, it has usually already hired on a CEO and taken on investors that now expect it to keep growing anyway. It can only do so by tossing away the things that made it unique, in order to appeal to the people it previously repelled; and hope that the people it previously attracted with that uniqueness, will stay through inertia.
Isn't this usually because a new VP comes in and wants to leave his mark on the product (in the same way a dog leaves his mark on a tree) and ends up ruining the platform? Google is notorious for this.
It seems inevitable that every growth-driven platform will -- like a balloon -- be grown until it bursts.
You're right in a sense that it does not threaten the international community, but the old design acted as a deterrent against the majority of "pictures, easy browsing and quick content" users, which have since drowned the original community. Most of the people I have been asking stayed away of reddit because of the interface, which is good because it retained only the people that were interested enough in the subject to dive into text-only pages.
