This article is interesting to hackers, in the sense that Simpsons or Seinfeld or some popular t.v. show is interesting. So it doesn't violate the guidelines per se, unless you use the "intellectually gratifying" interpretation. Sure, nmap itself is interesting, so by proxy people can have their intellect gratified, but submit a link to the home page instead. Tack on a '?' if it's a dupe from a year ago that you really feel strongly deserves a repeat appearance. (nmap probably is.) Sure this submission is on the /classic page too so maybe I should shut up, but I've seen a huge increase in the number of submissions that aren't intellectually gratifying yet still receive a lot of upvotes.
Furthermore I've been pressing the 'flag' button a lot more and downvoting what I see as poor quality comments a lot more. I noticed a massive increase in this behavior after the SOPA incident when we inherited a ton of (presumably) Reddit users, whereas before sometimes there'd be a week of crap and sometimes a week of awesome, it was less predictable.
Feel free to downvote if you think I'm overreacting, just crazy, or it's just me who has noticed.
I don't think there is a solution, though. This erosion seems like the inevitable path of any community-driven thing. No one is doing it deliberately, it's just what happens when you average out so many ideas of what “good” is.
I am certainly part of the problem. I haven't contributed anything of value. This comment is actively making the site worse. But this link was such tragically generic drivel, I felt the need to say something.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/c1/wellkept_gardens_die_by_pacifism/
