Oh, please. It's on the front page of Hacker News because Hacker News is full of credulous idiots, not because talking about pictures is bad or wrong.
No, actually. We average out to the same kind of mob-prone mooks we like to tut-tut at others for being. Except our mobs are about standing around going "Well, actually..." and that's marginally less puerile than what we see from 4chan mobs.
It might feel like skepticism, but from where I sit it looks a lot like pretentious pseudo-intellectual grandstanding. It's like hanging a somebody's napkin doodle in an art gallery just so you can complain that it's not the Mona Lisa.