It's not the QUESTION that's irrelevant. The answer is "what do you think about X" -- and the ANSWER is "I think X is supremely irrelevant -- because of Y."
An awful lot of what happens on the internet is irrelevant to me. And it is possible that there are people in the world to whom the significance of my internet contributions may not be readily apparent. That doesn't matter: I can find some community that will share almost any interest.
And, you know, there's a whole world of people whose sole purpose in life is to develop counterfeit versions of all kinds of websites -- personal sites, business sites, public-interest sites -- for their own ulterior motives. And they swarm, like rabid lemmings. As soon as Joe Search-Engine-Spammer finds that counterfeiting technique "Q" doesn't work any more, what does he do? He goes to all the webmaster forums and talks that technique up "to teh moon". And next thing you know, all his gullible competitors are wasting time trying to imitate technique "Q".
But from the ODP community standpoint, it doesn't matter what ulterior motive the counterfeiter has -- whatever it is, he can't have shared our interests, or he'd just link to content rather than aping it.
