Mmm, design patterns for humor. There are so many of them (lightbulb jokes, snowclones (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowclone), variations on Monty Python sketches, etc). The real challenge is to come up with new patterns, not to use existing ones.
I don't think xkcd just jumped the shark...I think it's kinda an ironic commentary on Tim Berners-Lee's comment about "stupid and immature" geek culture.
The last two comics struck me as being there because there needed to be a strip, rather than because they had something to say. I hope I'm wrong, though.
Well, a) that, and b) I think the reason this site jumped the shark, if it has indeed done so, is that it tried to start with a bunch of random business people as a community and turn it into a hacker community, rather than starting with a bunch of hackers and getting them interested in startups, which is what it wanted to do. What it's left with is a bunch of random business people trolling about random crap.
This site has always been populated with hackers and continues to be populated with hackers. Where are all these random business people you speak of coming from? Y Combinator is intended as a program for hackers and this site was made for YC to get a better sense of people applying to the program. If that happens to include some gasp business people, so be it.
There's always software discussion taking place here and if you don't think there's enough, then start a new thread discussing what you think is appropriate. You still have the power to make the site better by contributing worthwhile content. Relevant humor isn't banned here by any means... though I admit that the idea of a Paul Graham Facts meme is much funnier than the facts themselves.
The rate of ship jumping is accelerating. First, diggers jump to reddit. Then redditers jump to proggit. Proggits jump to hacker news. Where next? Soon it'll be a new social network site for every new thread. Then we'll need a meta social network site, and so on.
I do think a meta social news site is a good idea. It would just be a recommendation engine that fed you links you like from across digg, reddit, news.yc and beyond.
I bet the reddit engine could be adapted to do this. If the rating system could also rate items for you based on the interests of those who rated the page, where the rating value would be a function of the similarity of interests to yours, then it would no longer be eternal September. The only thing missing would be a meta commenting system, similarly constructed.
That the system would be based on existing networks would ensure the cross pollination of ideas between different interest groups.
Hackers are supposed to be smart people, and smart people don't go for this sort of stuff (Also, hackers don't go around asking people to paint paintings for them for negative compensation).
Look at the front page: the top link is this crap, and then of the top 10, we have 5 completely content-free links, and then another 5 links that are vaguely informative, but none of the kind of insightful fascinating long articles that make one's day (e.g. the violin string thing).
>Hackers are supposed to be smart people, and smart people don't go for this sort of stuff
That's a ridiculous assertion. You mean that you don't go for this stuff.
If you don't like the links that are on the page, spend some time finding a better link. It doesn't do any good to complain about something you have control over.
As one of the original couple that posted a PG fact, the intent wasn't malicious. Just found it creative, and if anything, good for a little chuckle that originated in the community.
That said, I'm a programmer, and have a background in EE and CS--I see myself as a hacker, though I'm always still learning. And I posted a comment supporting the change from startup news to hacker news, lamenting how I was sick of reading facebook and how to get VC money articles. So I was a little bit surprised by your comment, and made me reflect on my comment.
I think it's very easy to not read your feeds and just rely on hacker news. But then you end up reading what other people think is interesting, and that's a problem if it's not aligned. I agree with rms in this thread. I think if you want it better, you can always submit things you find interesting. That's what I do, and from my list of submissions, you can see it's usually tech things and programming issues.
But not everything gets upped that I think is interesting--for example, the Software Radio, and it's something you just shrug your shoulders at.
Of course, in hindsight, one can argue that little slips like this makes it a slippery slope, and pretty soon, we'll get pictures of lolcats fixing computers. That's not an unreasonable argument, considering we have lessons about boiling frogs, and never hire B people that hire C people.
Hacker news is as much my home as it is yours, so all apologies. I'd like to have it tickle my interesting bone everyday. Only serious interesting stuff from now on. >:-|
I think users are right to worry. I worry. There's a kind of gravity that seems to pull down news aggregators. It's all too clear what happens; lightweight and/or politically charged stuff is easy to vote up, because it requires little thought.
I'm hoping weighted voting will solve this, but I don't take it for granted.
I'm not too sure that it's because of the ease of voting. That's obviously part of it, but I think that as religious/political extremism rises, the propensity to vote also rises. So you tend to get extremists voting more often than "average" people who don't care enough one way or the other. And there is no good way to get around this-- it's a problem that has been around since Athens and mathematically weighing things probably wont do a lot of good.
This is why Ron Paul is mentioned in every reddit/digg thread.
I don't care for it either, and wouldn't mind if it disappeared, but you lost me with the gratuitous insult. That sort of thing isn't part of the sort of community I want to belong to.
People aren't writing those to suck-up to PG. It's humor...try laughing. Do you honestly think that people write jokes about Chuck Norris because they're Chuck Norris fanboys? It's just for fun...get over it.
I wonder if it's specifically a geek thing?