this post was submitted on 03 Mar 2024
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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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[–] gerikson@awful.systems 9 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

HN loves posting Wikipedia links, either as a social signalling tool, as a puppy-like wish to inform the world TIL, or a cynical karma-farming method.

From my dataset, here are the top 10 Wikipedia article submissions

  1. The Year 2038 Problem - 37
  2. Timeline of the far future - 29
  3. Lindy effect - 27
  4. Project Cybersyn - 27
  5. Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol - 26
  6. Dunning-Kruger effect - 25
  7. Jevons paradox - 25
  8. Peter principle - 25
  9. Wirth's law - 25
  10. Cobra effect - 24

EDIT here are the most commented Wikipedia submissions.

  1. Wikipedia user edits over 90k uses of “comprised of” - 695 comments
  2. 0.999 - 627 comments
  3. Wikimedia Foundation's runaway spending growth - 452 comments
  4. Georgism - 432 comments
  5. Men Without Work (2016) - 412 comments
  6. Wikimedia Foundation spending - 411 comments
  7. Wikipedia:Lamest edit wars - 408 comments
  8. The Great Vowel Shift (Wikipedia) - 386 comments
  9. Illegal Prime Numbers - 384 comments
  10. Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation - 382 comments

EDIT EDIT the most commented submissions from Wikipedia on https://lobste.rs

  1. Today I discovered /dev/full. Let's talk about more not well-know Linux features - 55 comments
  2. Wikipedia removing support for old Android smartphones and "Web Security" software - 54 comments
  3. GNU Readline - 25 comments
  4. Lobsters Wikipedia article - 25 comments
  5. Illegal prime - 18 comments
  6. ncdu: NCurses-based disk usage tool - 18 comments
  7. TempleOS - 17 comments
  8. Srinivasa Ramanujan - 15 comments
  9. BioFabric - Wikipedia - 14 comments
  10. Fisher-Yates Shuffle - 13 comments
[–] Fal@yiffit.net 8 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Or maybe no one read the post because the title gave no information and just links to a wiki article

[–] 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:

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.