I still miss what reddit used to be before everything went bad. I can sense that hubski is on the right path to recreating that sort of community where creativity can flourish, and hopefully do so without succumbing to a hivemind mentality. Many of us have been around long enough to see the rise and fall of one or more of our favorite internet communities, and have gained some sense of social intuition as to how communities develop and prosper (or crumble).
Will that intuition be enough to establish a set of social norms to protect us from Eternal September? Two decades after the era of AOL taking the internet out of academia and techie circles and into the living rooms of "the common folk", we've seen internet culture go truly mainstream. What's left? What's next?
Every last community that I've been a part of that has fallen into disrepair, there's always been a commercial aspect behind it. It's the little no-name guys that seem to keep chugging along until the people that run them get bored and close them down. The thing is, they might have changed a bit here and there over the years, but they never jumped the shark. It's enough to make you think for a minute.