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The Cult of Paul or the legitimate desire of us old timers to keep this site from turning into just another reddit.

I just up voted all the Erlang articles and it has nothing to with pg.

(I also happen to genuinely like Erlang)




1. If you upvoted all the Erlang articles yesterday, it has something to do with pg. I like Erlang too, but much of what made it to the front page was bullshit.

2. A day's worth of Erlang madness will do nothing for HN other than squash a day's worth of the usual stories. And when a few hundred users mass-upvote a few dozen stories for no other reason than that pg half-joked about it, I'd say that has more Reddit-nature than HN-nature.


Sure it keeps the drive by visitors from staying, but it makes HN useless (unless you _really_ _really_ like Erlang) for the next few days.

There has to be a better way to control the audience than intentionally ruining the content.


First of all, Erlang is something very much worth learning about.

Second, it will only be this way for a short while. As you grow older your attention span will natural grow, don't worry about it kiddo.


Whether Erlang is worth learning about is entirely beside the point. The issue is whether it's worth sand-bagging the content for everybody on the tenuous theory that Erlang repulses "the wrong kind of people for HN".

Simply, it gets annoying when pg turn HN back into social-experiment mode.

Your second sentence is ad-hominem idiocy and doesn't merit a response.


"keep this site from turning into just another reddit"

Why, because reddit has a wide variety of interesting links on its front page instead of a page full of Erlang links?


Then why are you here?

Honestly, if you enjoy reddit, why waste your time here? Reddit is bigger, more diverse and customizable.


"Then why are you here?"

Well, I did remove the hackernews rss feed from my homepage today. I generally like this site, but I find the comments to be on the verge of elitist. I think it's sad that you guys think I'm part of the "riff raff" that needs to be filtered from sites like this, but congrats, you guys filtered me out.


HN is a community of human beings. Human beings are prone to do apparently temporarily insane/irrational things such as follow memes, jokes, silly suggestions, etc. If you dislike that here, I'm sorry but you probably won't find it any better anywhere else...


Cool, the comments are bit elitist for you, they're great for me. Reddit is a better fit for you. HN for me, everybody wins! Hurray!




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