My username actually derives from what I feel to be reddit's (and most aggregates) biggest issue.

There is nothing to stop Ohanian and Erik Martin from running a PR firm called Antique Jetpack, consulting for whoever pays the prettiest penny, and facilitating the internal destruction of the organic curation of content. Nothing except for a reddit v2, but they seemed to have warded off any such fall from grace pretty well so far.

This, of course, has been an issue on reddit from the times of Ian Chong, saydrah, cinsere and that whore lauralie (she whored for the feds, what can I say?). But I do think it got much much worse after the 2011 "split"; wherein Advance threw down 18 million, Angel Investors were added (as small a percentage as they may be), and Ohanian came back as a board member.

What really concerns me about this trend on reddit is that for a majority of the millions who visit there each day these conversations about the organic curation of content are never seen nor understood. This is also most likely intentional; what with the removal of /r/reddit.com two years ago now. I feel that any one who was familiar with reddit pre digg v4 can't help but have a sour taste in their mouth as they watch the neutering of what was once a truly revolutionary medium.

I am not sure in what direction reddit's 230 million dollar valuation is going to go, but I do know that is very scary to watch default subreddits get treated like the front page of a Yellow Journalism rag.

It's funny that lots of us have a bit of a "love lost" feeling about reddit, and looking back at the innocence of early reddit it seems like that can't be unlearned or recreated in new forums.

Imo reddit failed to adapt its winning formula enough to cope with the gulf of difference between the small community and the multi-million-user president-interviewing subreddit.

With user-oriented publishing, Snapzu has room to be far more resilient to some of these influences, while offering curation and quality that twitter doesn't, so I'm pretty optimistic.