That's fine, but it's effectively a giant forum with volunteer moderators. I feel like it can best be described as the social equivalent of trying to steer a boat that's really 30,000 small boats all tied together.

They have volunteers with the ability to simply turn off huge traffic parts of their site? How is this a for-profit company?

I'm guessing they will take that power back from the community, under "responsibilities for default subreddits".

But if they would update their site (vs relying on 3rd parties) and update stuff and actually talk to these volunteers, they wouldn't be in this position. It's pretty impressive how they've managed to give an appearance of not caring.

I've been there five years, and really have no attachment to it whatsoever. You can say, "why go back?", but I'd just say, "why not?" It's pretty much because it's there.

Either way, I imagine a lot of people feel the same about it as I do. And when your product is that dispassionate, you risk everyone leaving for the "next big thing."

It's certainly happened many times before: Digg, Livejournal, Myspace, etc.

I'm not sure how you can really build a lot of commitment and loyalty from a community that basically just submits links and comments on them. Moderators, absolutely. But regular users?