I've never heard of Sometimes the Dragon, actually. And it's not about meme transmission: They've always been fast. The thing is, memes reflect a community's insider aspect. If you see a meme and allow it, you're allowing that self-congratulatory "We're on the Internet and know what the Internet thinks" aspect in. I mean, memes convey no useful information; they derail threads; very rarely is a meme used alongside relevant information. So on a site that uses upvoting/downvoting, as is all the rage here, a meme posting gets upvoted by all the people who kneejerk upvote memes, and downvoted by all the people who think that the community is worth more than a meme posting. (You can get that pretty clearly in this case, since memes usually aren't funny or clever beyond being repetitive, so don't get upvotes by non-kneejerkers.)
So when I joined Hacker News, a year and a half ago, memes weren't posted. Ever. It was antithetical to the idea of Hacker News. This was a place where serious-minded people talked about a very particular subset of information, almost all coding/business-related. When I joined, this was still almost entirely the case. Thing is, I joined at the same time that a lot of Redditors were also jumping ship, and we left for the same reasons, and we came to a community that was not what we wanted. Back when Reddit started, it was a geek haven, too, but geek havens are boring to nongeeks. What made Reddit so cool was when it became a center for interesting, unique links; problem was, when it did that it became nongeek, and so lots of people that weren't into the whole programming scene joined, and after a while the people that joined weren't interested in the community. So kind of like how 4chan got big when people heard it had awesome stuff, then got overloaded with memes, Reddit went through the same trend, and as it did, Hacker News went through the first major chance, which is that its community started being shared not just with coders but with people who just wanted big and detailed conversations. People like me, in other words.
There're a set of stories that don't feel oldschool Hacker Newsy. This is one of them. It's an interesting story, but it has nothing to do with hackers. And as much as I care about the community, I voted it up, because I and some users like me have an ulterior motive. I don't program, so I benefit when the top stories are dramatic ones and ones about social things rather than about programs and companies. I don't want Hacker News, I want old Reddit, and so that's how I attempt to shape the community. I still like conversation and interest, but I'm focused on a noncoding environment, ignore the programming stuff.
Still following me? Sweet, because I'm not the only sort of person who found Hacker News. We also saw a slew of wantrepreneurs and karma hounds. (To be fair, I'm also a little of each.) We had a ton of people join this community to promote their startup/get into YCombinator, and a few people who joined to gain karma points and "win", because any site that assigns a score to things works like that. Now, on Hacker News things aren't nearly as bad as they are now on Reddit, and HN is declining much more slowly, but what it means is the community's become bombarded with basically every small announcement you can imagine (remember when Facebook released usernames?) from the people who want points, and a ton of self-serving spam from everybody who owns a blog or a web site and wants attention. This further dilutes the site focus, especially when the various types of diluters work in tandem—the people, for instance, who will submit any story featuring/written by/commented on by a YCombinator graduate, excusing themselves with the "YCombinator news is hacker news" line that pretty much always works. So the original community, which is composed of sharp clever entrepreneurs, is slowly growing outnumbered on two fronts, both the non-coders and the people who want HN worsened for selfish reasons.
This isn't anything new. Last year, for instance, I had a fun thread where one guy made 20 throwaway accounts during an argument with me, upvoting himself and downvoting me to oblivion, all to promote a blog post. There've been several waves of newbies to Hacker News, and usually they either leave or they get incorporated with little damage. But Hacker News is becoming more and more well-known (fun story: one of the thirteen-year-old kids at the summer camp I worked at read Hacker News in school when he was bored), and with each successive wave we're failing to maintain that core focus. Or rather: We lost the core focus a long time ago, so that programming is only the central aspect of the site as frequently as blog drama or tech gossip is, and now the secondary focuses—good conversation and relevant discussion—are similarly slowly caving away. More and more people are downvoting based on disagreement, which is where it starts. In the month since I started posting again on HN, I've noticed that a lot of my posts are getting pummeled down in the first few minutes after I post them, then slowly voted back up. Other users and I have had discussions about that here. It's a sign that people are treating these conversations as games, where getting more upvotes means you're "winning" right fight. That means the door is open for more sensationalist postings, since those gain traction faster particularly when downvoting submissions isn't allowed. When you have 'turndead' on, you'll see it's not that surprising for five of the top thirty posts to be dead posts that moderators killed.
To make matters worse, Paul has shown quite a bit of apathy regarding this site. He sees it as a static community where no new features means no new change in community sentiment, and he's mistaken. I've seen a lot of complaints in the last week alone about broken features, moderator abuse, etc., complaints reaching almost the degree they were at back when forums had almost seen their intellectual heyday. In fact, the situation's very analogous. Social news is hitting the mainstream, and at the same time it's hitting the limits of what it's able to handle without breaking down. The Internet is moving more and more towards the new Twitter style of navigation, where each person is a single voice capable of choosing their own news, and the tech elite are moving towards that, be it Twitter, Tumblr, FriendFeed, or Facebook. There, you have all the power, no moderation required. Here, a site can last maybe twice as long as a forum, but it collapses all the same. I don't know if Paul's thought about this or cares much about it, but Hacker News is not invulnerable. It's past its prime by now, its most passionate users are growing dissatisfied, and it's not capable of reacting quickly enough to save itself from all the external troubles that are plaguing it more and more.
Which brings us back to memes. Memes are a sign of the end. They're what happens when a web site both acknowledges an external Internet and so loses its own unique voice, and begins generating its own inside jokes as a form of compensation. We're there. Erlang was the big warning sign, but we're at the point now where people have begun using Internet jokes for quick upvotes. And it's not a huge "this is the end of the HN" thing. It's slow, and subtle, and people don't mind much that it's happening, don't mind that some smart people are leaving or that the occasional joke's slipping in. But it certainly is happening, like it's happened to every site I've used save two: SomethingAwful and Metafilter, whose moderators work hard as the dickens to make sure the sites maintain their focus. On Hacker News, the moderators aren't fast enough or vicious enough to prevent things. What its method of quietly "killing" posts doesn't understand is that banning users wasn't just to stop them from arriving. It was to warn other users, very blatantly, that some shit was good and other shit was shit. Of course, SA and Metafilter also charge for admission, which goes a long way toward preserving community.
Long story short: Sites can be studied by how they treat memes. Social news is theoretically a way to prevent corruption, but it buckles under too much weight, particularly now that the people that should be defending networks now have an opt-out system they can use to avoid the hassles altogether. So now, instead of downvoting fiercely and giving the community a focus, they either join in or don't put up much of a fight and my mom got scared and said you're movin' with your auntie and uncle in Bel-Air. I whistled for a cab and when it came near the license plate said "Fresh", and it had dice in the mirror. If anything I could say that this cab was rare but I thought "Man, forget it yo homes to Bel-Air."