What to Fix

I don't think I'm humourless, but I value HN as one of the few places on the public internet where intelligent discussion is still possible without being drowned out by regurgitated memes and fart jokes. While in theory it's possible to have both, I haven't seen it happen elsewhere.

The comparisons to Reddit are discouraged not because they are baseless, rather for fear that they may be self-fulfilling. Reddit used to feel like a community as well, and I used to enjoy reading the comments there as well. It's worth asking 'What changed?' and 'What could have been done differently?'

I just looked at your link: http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2010/05/nerdy-cute-girl.php

It struck me as a parody of the worst possible thing you could post here: non-funny, sexually stereotyped, ethnocentric, and devoid of insight; but with just enough of a hook to get a significant number of upvotes. It's soft porn with a plausible excuse. And once people saw that this was acceptable, I'm sure we'd see more of the same.

If I were the moderator, I'd have not only deleted it but emailed you to tell you that if you do it again your account will be banned. This isn't because I'm against humor, or against porn, but because I can't see the community I enjoy remaining intact while adding this sort of boorish fluff.

I don't want to pick on you too much, but did you picture the conservative religious users being amused by this, or did you set out to offend them? Did you consider how it…

Governments have always used their power to try to further special interests.

One might as easily argue special interests have always used their power to try to corrupt governments. After all, government is not in the content-production-for-profit business, and legislation like the DMCA is designed to benefit established publishers and manufacturers whose business model is threatened by unlicensed distribution.

So we might as well ask what is the fundamental problem with business, that makes it preferable to enlist law enforcement in defense of its interests than to do well by offering consumers a value they can't get from content piracy? I think there is some merit to the argument that leaders in the content industry have bought off political interests, but if they were somehow restricted from doing so, wouldn't that be a violation of free speech too? That whole Citizens United case in front of the Supreme Court last year was based on the idea that spending $$$ to influence an election is just as much free speech as any other kind of political activity.

Even though I'm emotional about this, I see no reason to rant and rave.

No offense meant here Daniel, but that's exactly what you do. On almost any thread involving regulation or government intervention, it's become very predictable to see a mini-essay from you at the top of the thread, and it's almost always general in nature rather than addressing any specific of the story itself. You always aim to be non-partisan by…

> I've created my own guidelines for now: no rewrites, no link-spam, no tricking the user, no link-bait. Perhaps I need more. Don't know. That's all I have so far.

Google Webmaster Guidelines: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769

"We strongly encourage you to pay very close attention to the 'Quality Guidelines,' which outline some of the illicit practices that may lead to a site being removed entirely from the Google index or otherwise penalized. "

http://www.whattofix.com/ looks a little dodgy through the eyes of a SEO link farm hunter when it links to http://www.hamburger-casserole-recipes.com/ and http://neuropathyinfeet.us/ and http://paycheck-stub.com/ and http://facebook-login-help.com/
What sets it apart is obviously those sites really DO provide original information on those topics. But the layout of something like http://www.hamburger-casserole-recipes.com looks like http://www.spamrecipes.net/ which just copies other people's recipes and sticks a juicy ad block under them. It's hard to be honest in a world of scammers.

There are certainly people who predict that this will happen. (Example: http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2012/01/programming-is-1.php)

Ironically enough one of my goals is to cause this to happen. Which while sounding like some sort of betrayal, is really an enrichment of human creativity. Concentrating the heart of what defines the 21st century into a sort of weakly protected oligarchy makes me feel nervous about the future. The thing about cars is that they represent a different revolution, one which doesn't necessarily require people to join in on what would probably be called "hacking" if the equivalent tasks were done on a computer to have their full effect.

Part of the power of the home computer and electronics revolutions is that the programmability of the computer is itself a medium. A largely underutilized medium that has more potential than most others. To have this medium marginalized by a widespread belief that it's beyond peoples capability is really...depressing.

Also, do any companies exist that are trying to make the whole lifecycle of ebook self-publishing dead simple for non-techies? It seems that it's "not that easy"(1) even for techies and that non-techie authors can be overwhelmed with the amount of work they have to do that isn't writing a book(2). The only relevant company I know of is http://leanpub.com, but they state in their manifesto that they are only interested in the very specific and (I'm guessing here) relatively uncommon style of incremental self-publishing.

(1) http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2012/01/e-book-publishi.php

(2) http://www.npr.org/2012/01/08/144804084/a-self-published-authors-2-million-cinderella-story around 5:30 in the audio

This previous blog post by him is totally crass:
http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2009/05/allison-stokke.php#more

"For a $10 donation, I'll scour the internet and send you all the Allison Stokke pictures that you can find."

Followed later by: "I know that Allison definitely did not want in the spotlight -- that was one of the points of my original article."

No, actually the point of your original article was to drive traffic to your blog, which is why you keep saying her name over and over, intentionally including certain misspellings.