Believe me, it's real. I've been on reddit for a long time and I've seen it go from a great site with quality links to kitten pictures and "Vote Up If You H@te Hillary" posts. It's not as bad as most people say, but it's certainly a different site than it was a year ago. I'm not sure how to prevent it here, other than manually editing the system and deleting certain users.
Perhaps I should clarify that I'm not convinced that it's real on news.yc. Not yet, anyway.
Yeah, reddit and Digg are disaster areas. I don't know why, and your guess is as good as mine. My impression is that, in Digg's case, they tended to play up the gaming aspect early on -- e.g. they put up huge banners trumpeting the number of diggs for each article -- and built their audience out of people who think that competing to push articles up the leaderboard is a fun sport. Now they've reaped the whirlwind. Reddit, I'm not so sure I could even guess. I didn't stick around to analyze the phenomenon; I just left.
I do agree, however, that the only proven solution involves manually editing the system to some degree.
