It is a public debate whose nature is similar discourse that focuses in on an approximate truth. Your comment is especially unfair when directed at such a consistently high quality blog.

Could the OP be referring more specifically to HN? HN is akin to a curated system, and of course there are plenty of duplicate submissions on HN.

I'm not expressing an opinion one way or the other. Rather, that was my take on his comment, which amused me.

I apologize. My intent was to use sarcasm to comment about the nature of internet publishing and curating in general, and I believe it came across as criticism towards this author or work. That was not my intention. In fact it was just the opposite.

There is a lot of trash that gets returned in a Google search at times, yes, but there are also a lot of authors out there simply taking a subject and providing their own unique spin on it. Every time somebody publishes -- anything at all -- they open themselves up to exactly the types of criticism the author of this pieces makes about other publishers on the net. I saw other commenters doing this on HN about this particular article and the irony struck me as astounding. The only thing I would have added to his piece is a discussion about exactly what he means as "bad" or "good", since everybody fills in the blanks with their own prejudices when these concepts are mentioned, and that's not a good thing for purposes of the discussion.

I should have known better than to try to be subtle. Humor almost never consistently works the way you want it to on the net. Always backfires in some fashion.