2. New News, Specifically, a community moderated site akin to reddit

[JakeCarpenter]

As Marc Andreessen points out, newspapers are in trouble. The problem
is not merely that they've been slow to adapt to the web. It's more
serious than that: their problems are due to deep structural flaws
that are exposed now that they have competitors. When the only sources
of news were the wire services and a few big papers, it was enough to
keep writing stories about how the president met with someone and they
each said conventional things written in advance by their staffs.
Readers were never that interested, but they were willing to consider
this news when there were no alternatives.News will morph
significantly in the more competitive environment of the web. So
called "blogs" (because the old media call everything published online
a "blog") like PerezHilton and TechCrunch are one sign of the future.
News sites like Reddit and Digg are another. But these are just the
beginning. +2
HN has shown that focused aggregators can keep a sense of community
and stay on topic while experiencing rapid growth. Could we create a
competitor to Reddit which would focus on the more intellectual
subreddits (Science, Proggit, etc.), and create it in such a way that
it does not degrade as users increase, but still has a sense of
community and cross pollination among topics?

I think community degredation will occur regardless of how well
you try to curate it. Once it grows beyond a certain size the
dynamics will necessarily change

True, but there must be a way to mitigate it somewhat