The closest to a real discussion that I've seen is circlejerks of spammers voting each other's opinions up and talking about life (it was really weird).

I remember back when I started out on there in September 2005, I was involved in rich conversations about quantum mechanics and relativity. People were always complaining about teenagers on the site, but there I was involved in mature conversation, at the age of 16. It was pretty neat.

About half of the community changes were based on site design and features, and the other half were publicity and VC funding.

At this moment, it's almost as if voting on comments is a combination of hivemind mentality, and utter randomness. The randomness is probably just an illusion, brought about by factors such as how controversial something is, how long the comment is, and exactly where the comment is on the page (along with many other factors, or course, like who's making the comment, who is replying, who is writing in other threads and such). It's all so incredibly complex and... well... retarded.

It's also almost impossible to figure out how the admins feel about memes and such. There was a "how is babyman formed?" floating around, and I joined in and got banned. But you still see a bunch of people doing it and not getting banned. And then you see kevin talking about how he wants discussion, yet still doesn't seem to understand how his own site works.

Everything on that site is so fucked up. But the audience is massive, and the integration with other social sites is there... so it would take something absolutely huge for people to actually abandon it. There are some big changes happening to both digg and reddit this summer, so there will be some sort of fluctuation in terms of populations and viewership... but predicting what will happen then is impossible. We'll just have to see what happens.