> 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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