Salmon is disappearing.

Re:Salmon is disappearing. by walterk on Tuesday June 10, 2008 @05:53PM (#214333)

It's a bit of a stretch as far as relevance to the hacker/entrepreneur community goes, although this suddenly makes me realize that the same is true for almost all of those astronomy and theoretical physics stories that get submitted here. But they're more traditionally geeky subjects so nobody complains. Go fig.

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Re:Salmon is disappearing. by hobbs on Tuesday June 10, 2008 @06:47PM (#214381)

Well, there's democracy and then there's mobocracy.

Democracy says that this place is peopled with hackers and if the hacker citizens upvote a story then it is, ipso facto, of interest to hackers.

Mobocracy says that demi-hackers trickle in and start upvoting stories and posting comments that attract quasi-hackers. The quasi-hackers then attract non-hackers and you eventually no longer have a narrow community. The stories that appeal to the lowest common denominator then rise to the top, due to sheer statistics.

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Re:Salmon is disappearing. by walterk on Tuesday June 10, 2008 @07:52PM (#214441)

> Democracy says that this place is peopled with hackers and if the hacker citizens upvote a story then it is, ipso facto, of interest to hackers.

1. Not all hackers share the same interests. Just 'cause some hackers upvoted a story doesn't imply that the story is of interest to (1) hackers as a category, or even (2) the hacker community found at Hacker News. You're conflating two uses of the word 'hackers' with your "ipso facto": one referring to a specific subset of hackers, the other referring to hackers as a whole.

2. Mobocracies are just democracies characterized by unruliness and impulsiveness: it's perfectly feasible to have a mobocracy composed entirely of hackers. You don't need demi- or quasi-hackers to cause the problems we've been seeing, and it's not clear that this is in fact the cause for deterioration in relevance of submitted stories. I wouldn't be surprised if most of it comes from hackers who just aren't being thoughtful about what they submit.

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Re:Salmon is disappearing. by mlinsey on Tuesday June 10, 2008 @07:52PM (#214442)

This suggests an interesting way of looking at the problem, namely "How do we make the site less interesting for non-hackers?"

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Re:Salmon is disappearing. by diego on Wednesday June 11, 2008 @03:37AM (#214693)

Perhaps require solving a hacker-related "captcha" for submitting stories or posting until your karma has passed a certain threshold. For example, fix a line of code or enter the order of complexity of an algorithm.

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Re:Salmon is disappearing. by noonespecial on Wednesday June 11, 2008 @10:12AM (#214862)

Sweet! Then we'd get major practice in for our Google interview as well. Don't forget puzzles involving sparrows, rowboats, candles, and ropes for those of us who might be elsewhere-bound.

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Re:Salmon is disappearing. by nazgulnarsil on Wednesday June 11, 2008 @01:46PM (#215080)

people in academic disciplines have known for years that the best way to to get joe public to leave you alone is to make your interests seem really boring.

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Re:Salmon is disappearing. by walterk on Wednesday June 11, 2008 @05:45PM (#215351)

This all assumes that non-hackers are to blame. I haven't seen any evidence that this is the case.

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Re:Salmon is disappearing. by sophist on Tuesday June 10, 2008 @05:56PM (#214339)

Didn't you get the handbook? Hackers are supposed to care about astronomy, physics, and math also. Not fish.

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Re:Salmon is disappearing. by tjr on Tuesday June 10, 2008 @06:12PM (#214353)

I dunno; when I read this one, my thought was "so long, and thanks for being fish", which is sufficiently hackish for my tastes.

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Re:Salmon is disappearing. by menloparkbum on Tuesday June 10, 2008 @06:21PM (#214360)

What I got out of it was some dink in New York is upset because Lox is $2.50 an ounce. I probably wouldn't have minded the article so much if it wasn't an op-ed piece.

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Re:Salmon is disappearing. by Spyckie on Tuesday June 10, 2008 @06:17PM (#214357)

haha, same here. Isn't it "thanks for all the fish?"

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Re:Salmon is disappearing. by tjr on Tuesday June 10, 2008 @06:44PM (#214379)

Not when you're talking to the fish. :-)

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