I find this phenomenon to be most interesting. Digg is constantly worried about becoming 4chan, reddit is paranoid towards becoming digg, and HN is speculates about becoming reddit. The question i'm ultimately asking is where is this place that fears degradation into HN? finally which social media portal is so elite, so stealthy that they have no fears at all?
OK, ok I kid, I kid... but you are inferring that there is a lisp of forums, and most fall in the blub category. Whilst this is entirely possible, there is a lot more scope for orthogonal directions in discussion.
It might be interesting to contrast some alternative discussion forums / mailing lists and discuss the relative strengths of each, rather than worry about becoming reddit or digg od 4chan or /.
Finally which social media portal is so elite, so stealthy that they have no fears at all?
I don't know if you'd call us "elite", but we're still really small over here (full disclosure: this is my website) http://www.gibsonandlily.com (this is mostly just my friends and I along with a few people that jumped ship from reddit)
Most of the articles are science and technology related, with a few funny, economic, and political things peppered in.
