Ask YC: Hacker News has got POINTS... I smell some game theory here?
Is it true that Hacker News is based on a game theory... where users play a game to get points... and this game keeps HN alive? same goes for Reddit.
What views you have ?
Is that so different from how society works? There may be no numbers displayed, but a lot of society works through affirmations of one kind of another.
When a forum tries to focus on a small number of topics, people accuse it of "groupthink". When a forum doesn't try to focus on a small number of topics, people accuse it of being the next Reddit, or Digg, or whatever.
For that matter, you should know better than to throw around the "groupthink" accusation, when your own project encourages people to tune out everything that they think they don't like, until they only see things that they'll like anyway.
Let's use something a little more descriptive than "groupthink".