Reddit is already spilling over the container. The overwhelming majority of the site traffic has no loyalty to it and no memory of what it was. They're the guys who go from MeeBo to Friendster to Myspace to Facebook to G+ without really noticing where they are - it's just another place where they do their thing.

The interesting thing about "hot-tubbing" is that it's something Reddit's architecture lends itself to quite neatly, but which the admins and community are petrified of. When 32bites said "I'm killing r/IAmA" the admins could have said "this is right. This is good. Go open another somewhere" but they didn't. They aided and abetted PHOY/Karmanaut/Bechus in strongarming it out from under 32bites.

That's because Reddit thinks pageviews are their holy of holies, not content.

I've had this conversation with Erik Martin (hueypriest). It went something like this:

kleinbl00 - did you ever stop to think that maybe you have too many pageviews and subscribers already?

hueypriest - never. We only see Reddit growing from here.

kleinbl00 - but what do you get from that? 4chan was way bigger than you guys initially, and had far more pageviews. Yet 4chan is deeply in debt and Chris Poole isn't even employable.

hueypriest - Reddit isn't 4chan. Besides, we know we have some community debt to pay off and we intend to get started on that soon.

kleinbl00 - much to little, much too late.