one of the most annoying things about social news sites is that because the content tends to be skewed heavily towards the preferences of the early adopters and the core users, it can be very difficult for newcomers who don’t subscribe to the same preferences to enjoy the sites. as a result, many of the newcomers end up leaving the site. in an effort to curb this problem, reddit has updated their algorithm to normalize the ‘hotness’ of the stories promoted to the front page of the site.
Interestingly, as Frederic notes, the Reddit community has reacted quite positively to the changes to the sites algorithm, which is a stark contrast to what seems to happen every single time Digg makes a change to its algorithm. Aside from that, though, the changes have already seen their positive effects on the 'l33t Reddit' section, where the subscriber count continues skyward to upwards of 1250 as of this afternoon.