I think we're officially past the point where we can say the quality of our posts are any more hackery than they are on Reddit, which is where I first saw this three years ago.
I'm not completely against that, but if things like this are hitting the front page, I don't know if we're still entirely Hacker News and think we should be aware of that.
Hacker News is (partly) an experiment to see how big a specialist community can get without becoming generalist. We've even had occasional population-control events - Erlang spam - to keep out the riffraff, because it looks like HN is hovering really close to the edge for a while now. It may be time to implement harsher forms of moderation than just a flag & a downvote.
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 17.5 ms ] threadI'm not completely against that, but if things like this are hitting the front page, I don't know if we're still entirely Hacker News and think we should be aware of that.