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HN has no opinions on memetics (news.ycombinator.com)

submitted 8 months ago by corbin@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems

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Sometimes what is not said is as sneerworthy as what is said.

It is quite telling to me that HN's regulars and throwaway accounts have absolutely nothing to say about the analysis of cultural patterns.

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[–] corbin@awful.systems 8 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

That's a real possibility. At risk of going NSFW, HN seems to have a very predictable reaction to links to (English) WP; their comments are always tangents based on personal experiences. For example:

An article about a book gets book reviews
An article about modern slang gets whippersnapper discourse
An article about a UNIX command gets examples of how they like to use it

But (at risk of invoking the shape-rotator stereotype) it seems like it's hard for HN's denizens to imagine a time when they personally were experiencing a memetic effect because memes are patterns rather than concretions. For analogy, an HN full of fish would not leave a single comment on the Fish WP article, ~~"Water."~~ Edit: A fairer example would be an article like "Properties of Water", because memetics is the study of memes, and memes are like water. ("Hydrodynamics" isn't a standalone article, but it would be another good candidate.)

[–] Fal@yiffit.net 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

So try posting an article "Oxygen" with a link to the oxygen wikipedia article.

[–] corbin@awful.systems 2 points 8 months ago

Go for it! I don't have any active HN accounts and I don't want to make one.