The internet has introduced us to lots of ways for something to die. So this guy thinks that reddit is flogging a dead horse, or something, but the general idea is that he's sick of what feels like endlessly repetitive posts and memes and whatnot. I've been internet-ing since 1995 and the slow death of news aggregator sites is getting very repetitive in itself.

Most recently for me was Digg. For several months I had been getting totally sick of the invasion of humorous, cynical, sarcastic, or pun-based stuff. Eventually 95% of the front page was little more than my Dad's Hotmail inbox circa 2001.

Second, any time anyone created a political post of some sort, the discussion would devolve into hyper-partisan fuckstickery within 5 minutes of hitting the front page.

Finally, it became ridiculously easy to game the site, and such behaviour was rampant. There was no strategy too sleazy, and the site management didn't have a clue how to fix it.

Finally, the absurd saga over advertising models was pathetic to watch. For years they tried different types of advertising, but they could never generate decent revenue. Eventually their ideas for advertising was so annoying and invasive I couldn't face it any more.

So is Reddit going to meet the same fate? The site management seems a lot better, and at least Conde Nast don't seem to have ruined anything. They don't have so many crises over revenue generation and the advertising platform seems very stable.

Unfortunately, the front page has turned into an imgur index with at least 2/3 of posts going straight to that site. Once a link takes you to imgur, you can then browse using their gallery interface and it's quicker than using reddit. That's a real problem.

Reddit fortunately has the subreddit concept, so I can easily avoid the front page completely when I can no longer cope with it. Unfortunately that means I will be missing out on some posts that don't fall onto my 2 or 3 subreddits I use most often. I learned how to combine subreddits on the URL so I'm golden, apart from the annoyance of missing things and now knowing.

But it's the mass of casual visitors who hit the front page and never bother learning anything deeper about the site who will desert en masse if the imgur posts dominate the front page more than they do now.

I think something has to be done about it, but I can't think of a solution that wouldn't earn me instant scorn from 90% of redditors.

Ultimately, reddit will die; it's the natural order and only a very few websites can expect to last in perpetuity. But hopefully it stays at the top for 5 or 10 more years instead of one or two. They just need to fix the images problem.

Who am I to pass judgement on reddit's future? Nobody; in reality I know nothing, I'm just making shit up. If you disagree with me, you are most likely right. Anyway, the 'flogging a dead horse' is understandable sentiment but it's probably an over-reaction.

tl;dr - reddit might die thanks to the domination of imgur posts (and other similar shit) on the front page, it's fucked. But the other issues that killed Digg are probably not going to bother us here.