1. Many programmers are music fans.
2. Many programmers are collectors.
3. The very existence of this collection is surprising.
4. The ridiculous $10 rebate says something about eBay's software, which was being discussed here a few days ago.
I will never understand why people click topics just to comment on their irrelevancy. You're upset because you think someone is wasting your time, so you...waste your own?
I can't downmod articles, so my only recourse is to leave a comment.
One bad submission leads to others (a news forum analogue of the "broken window " phenomena as explained in Gladwell's Tipping Point). I want this site to remain great.
I grant you it was borderline :) But the fact that it has nothing to do with hacking doesn't mean it isn't of interest to hackers, which is how I understand the scope of the site. (Maybe you have to be the type of hacker who used to spend hours combing through piles of obscure records...) This is also a bit random. A few of the (to me) most interesting things I posted here got no attention at all.
The risk of noise overwhelming signal à la digg/reddit is garnering a lot of attention, but there are opposite risks too (lack of diversity, or people not posting stuff that would be of interest 'cause they're afraid of getting scolded).
I felt that way at first, but then it occurred to me that all these "isn't relevant" vs. "is too" disagreements, taken together, are the emergent behavior of this community defining its own scope. There's a middle ground between small-and-specialized and ruined-like-digg-and-reddit, and nobody quite knows where it is. Or rather, everyone draws the lines somewhat differently, and so there's this period of zillions of micro-negotiations while a consensus works itself out.
Edit: changed "narrow" to "specialized" to avoid implying that small is bad.
I agree. Raising questions about appropriateness, complaining, and engaging in frank meta-discussion seem like healthy things, whether you agree with them or not. I also agree with downvoting the complaint if you disagree, though.
Think of a bunch of monkeys with ADD thoughtlessly firing cartridge after cartridge of snarky one-liners in the hope of winning some points from fans of snarky one-liners. Anything that is the opposite of that is probably a good thing.
I'm not sure about small, but a site definitely doesn't have to be narrow to not suck. Old Reddit wasn't narrow, and it lasted for some time. Where did this meme even come from?
I think it comes from the site's original scope being limited to startup news. But you're right - "narrow" has a pejorative connotation, and I didn't mean to imply suckage. Maybe "specialized" would be more precise (I'll revise it).
