alt Hacker NewsI think you could argue that this is following the same trend as forums (and usenet before that). You get a consolidation of where people go to read up on things that interest them.
Look at Slashdot for example, it was once so popular that any site it linked to could be "slashdotted" from all the traffic. Now people go elsewhere. YouTube, TikTok, Reddit.
What happened to Slashdot wasn't a "consolidation", though, it was a suicide. I was a heavy reader of the site up until they had an infamous redesign that made the site literally unusable for me, so I left.
That's very different from the scenario discussed in the article.