If anyone wonders why there was such a high proportion of articles about startups at first, it was because the site was initially called "Startup News." After 6 months or so we changed the name and focus.
Do you think that as a site becomes large enough people start to change their own focus and sort of get lost in the crowd? That eventually people are just disillusioned by the site itself? I noticed this is sort of happening with reddit / digg.
I don't think largeness is the problem in itself so much as the decline in quality and civility that usually accompanies it. If we can avoid decline we're ok. This is mostly uncharted territory, but I'm hopeful. I'm going to be working this year on tweaks to encourage people to be more civil in comment threads.