Yes, pretty much.
Though Slashdot and Digg have the same problem, I think the reason people here use Reddit as the canonical example of what not to become is that many of them are refugees from Reddit specifically. Also perhaps because Reddit had the greatest fall. (I don't know about Slashdot, but I suspect Digg was never that great.)
I was also on Slashdot pretty early -- I still have a low 5-digit UID there -- and back around 1999 it was pretty incredible. It's bounced back a little since the Natalie-Portman-Hot-Grits days, but not nearly enough.
Might be that the other way for me to look at this is, I am the death knell for any social networking site that I start hanging around on. ;-)
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=122287
Reddit gets mentioned a lot for this reason: it got a huge bunch of users initially from people following a link that pg posted, so the initial stories and discussions were pretty good. Then it started devolving into a community that is often not pleasant to interact with unless you stick to one of the subreddits. People don't want that to happen here.
Let it be what it will be and relax, please. :)
That's a good strategy for a startup, because a startup generally wants to have as many users as possible. In that case you want to let the site evolve into whatever interests the most users. But this is not a startup; at this site the goal is quality, not growth.
A sincere thank you for that...