What's happening with ????? ????? is the same thing that happens with anything new and interesting. At the beginning, everybody wants to see what it is. They gather around and check it out. But gradually, people start to lose interest.

The people who don't lose interest become more and more involved. And the medium starts to be influenced by only those people. It becomes something exclusive to the people who've stuck with it for a long time. And when the people who were interested in it at first look back at it, it's no longer the thing that interested them.

This quote from Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto (who knows something about how to keep people interested in something for years) is actually about video games, but I think the same has happened in a lot of mediums: comic books, movies, television, radio, etc. It's from this article: The Man Who Keeps Nintendo Cool