Fark was the first aggregator of its kind. The headlines were hilarious and the curated content was really great.
Unfortunately Drew's ego killed the place. Digg arrived and was allowing a true democracy of content. Instead of Fark empowering its users the same way, they continued to control the content from the top. So, people went to where THEY had the power.
So Drew didn't really kill Fark, he just didn't change it to be something that wasn't Fark and lost users to people that wanted something different.
I don't think that's what Spez is doing to Reddit at all. Spez is actively trying to make Reddit into a cookie cutter social media platform, which it is (was) not.