It's certainly possible there's a backend flag on the site. But from the comments I see on Reddit, I suspect there may be a simpler explanation: a lot of people for some reason really dislike John Gruber and view him as someone who slavishly praises Apple. I'm a big John Gruber fan, and I don't think this is true in the slightest. I think he thinks carefully, forms his own opinions, and is very willing to intensely c…
Which is the problem and why I would guess that there is an automatic downranking to the domain, and why many knee-jerk flag entries from the site. Not that you specifically are a fan, but that a big enough minority of HN users would describe themselves as such and would submit and upvote entries from the site.
The bulk of DF entries could best be described as opinion/my-take type content. What does John think about screen sizes (e.g. 3.5 inches is the "sweet spot"), or Mark Gurman, the EU, etc.
Opinions generally do poorly here, for good reason. It is the junk food of content. It's easy and entertaining to read, especially if it agrees with our own notions so it's self-assuring, and if I think Apple are great I love to read opinions on why the EU are wrong with their DMA push, etc.
I would also argue it's the laziest content to write. The whole blog-rush were millions of people spinning up blogs to give their hot take on Current Zeitgeist Thing, but then it turned out that more people want to write that than read it so it faded away.
But because there were numbers of fans here, every Gruber opinion would shoot to the top of HN. It takes a tiny minority of HN users to make a story hit #1 -- right now the top four stories have barely dozens of upvotes -- so it would happen again and again and again, and people would click through and see an opinion about some thing and click back and they'd have no down arrow. Nor does the site weight "click throughs but didn't vote up". So people flag. Eventually, I presume, a domain downranking was applied.
Daring Fireball isn't the only domain like this. There are various other "I'm a fan of this guy!" type personalities that would constantly top HN despite the content arguably not deserving it. Content that if it came from anywhere else would be considered blog spam. Content that could literally be just a comment on HN.
There is another comment that opines that they want to see more daringfireball content on HN. I mean, they could just visit his site, or they could just hit https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=daringfireball.net, but what they really seem to mean is that they want everyone else to see more content from DF.
It's also ridiculous how people keep trying to make this an anti-Apple thing. Apple product announcements and technology releases do extremely well on here. Those have a real impact on the lives of most users of HN, whereas DF opinion entries don't.
>since I posted this, the article was flagged. Which I think may support the thesis
Whines about voting/moderation on HN almost always do extremely poorly on here. In this case DF has had multiple multi-hundred upvoted submissions on here over the past couple of months, and the entitlement of actually complaining that every random post doesn't do numbers absolutely deserves to be flagged.