I think community oriented websites have stress moments, typically policy or technical in nature, that signal the period in which uniques begin a steady drop-off. Digg has its with the move to approved submitters in v4. I fear while banning FPH was the right thing to do, this is going to stunt the uniques that Reddit draws.

And i'll leave it at that because it looks like, if the comments are telling, Hacker News is going full-on Eternal September right now.