Regarding your second sentence, it's interesting that the exact same thing happened to reddit in 2005.
I wonder how the population sizes compare.
In their case, blind upvoting of empty politically-charged headlines turned off mainstream visitors (or just people who were looking for actual content in their political links) and attracted ever more such voters in a vicious cycle. Fortunately, the creation of /r/politics helped, but the site to this day struggles to keep /r/politics from overflowing into the rest of the site.
I wonder how the population sizes compare.
In their case, blind upvoting of empty politically-charged headlines turned off mainstream visitors (or just people who were looking for actual content in their political links) and attracted ever more such voters in a vicious cycle. Fortunately, the creation of /r/politics helped, but the site to this day struggles to keep /r/politics from overflowing into the rest of the site.