Fake apologies in advance, this is a meta-comment. I'm throwing this out there, so HN, we need to have a talk.
This article is interesting to hackers, in the sense that Simpsons or Seinfeld or some popular t.v. show is interesting. So it doesn't violate the guidelines per se, unless you use the "intellectually gratifying" interpretation. Sure, nmap itself is interesting, so by proxy people can have their intellect gratified, but submit a link to the home page instead. Tack on a '?' if it's a dupe from a year ago that you really feel strongly deserves a repeat appearance. (nmap probably is.) Sure this submission is on the /classic page too so maybe I should shut up, but I've seen a huge increase in the number of submissions that aren't intellectually gratifying yet still receive a lot of upvotes.
Furthermore I've been pressing the 'flag' button a lot more and downvoting what I see as poor quality comments a lot more. I noticed a massive increase in this behavior after the SOPA incident when we inherited a ton of (presumably) Reddit users, whereas before sometimes there'd be a week of crap and sometimes a week of awesome, it was less predictable.
Feel free to downvote if you think I'm overreacting, just crazy, or it's just me who has noticed.
People were already bemoaning the decline in quality when I started reading a year ago, but even then, the type of article that made it to the front page was completely different than what you could find on any other site. We are getting progressively farther from that unique tone as time goes on.
I don't think there is a solution, though. This erosion seems like the inevitable path of any community-driven thing. No one is doing it deliberately, it's just what happens when you average out so many ideas of what “good” is.
I am certainly part of the problem. I haven't contributed anything of value. This comment is actively making the site worse. But this link was such tragically generic drivel, I felt the need to say something.
There is a solution, but the community doesn't generally tend to like it even though it's for their own good. The solution is aggressive culture pruning by trusted lieutenants.
This article is interesting to hackers, in the sense that Simpsons or Seinfeld or some popular t.v. show is interesting. So it doesn't violate the guidelines per se, unless you use the "intellectually gratifying" interpretation. Sure, nmap itself is interesting, so by proxy people can have their intellect gratified, but submit a link to the home page instead. Tack on a '?' if it's a dupe from a year ago that you really feel strongly deserves a repeat appearance. (nmap probably is.) Sure this submission is on the /classic page too so maybe I should shut up, but I've seen a huge increase in the number of submissions that aren't intellectually gratifying yet still receive a lot of upvotes.
Furthermore I've been pressing the 'flag' button a lot more and downvoting what I see as poor quality comments a lot more. I noticed a massive increase in this behavior after the SOPA incident when we inherited a ton of (presumably) Reddit users, whereas before sometimes there'd be a week of crap and sometimes a week of awesome, it was less predictable.
Feel free to downvote if you think I'm overreacting, just crazy, or it's just me who has noticed.