The Website Hacker News Is Afraid to Discuss • Hacker News Board

Re: The Website Hacker News Is Afraid to Discuss

#151

Post by kccqzy » Thu, Mar 27, 2025, 3:48 PM UTC

sedev wrote: post #34

graeme wrote: post #16

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…

"But this means his pro and con opinions don't match typical opinions and this makes him polarizing. And hence some people will flag his articles reflexively or post reflexive dismissals. And Hacker News is heavily weighted to downrank polarizing articles." The downranking is particularly weird since HN's professed norms go extremely hard on something along the lines of "you should take atypical opinions seriously si…

This is not at all weird if you are a HN user with somewhat unpopular opinions. The HN guidelines say flag something if it's egregious. People end up treating flagging as a stronger version of downvotes.

My most recent experience being flagged matches this up: I was presenting an argument that Chrome's manifest V3 is a good thing and it was flagged to death. I have no doubt that some users just flag this kind of opinion reflexively.

Re: The Website Hacker News Is Afraid to Discuss

#152

Post by rezmason » Thu, Mar 27, 2025, 3:53 PM UTC

jgruber wrote: post #113

rezmason wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> Case in point: just the other day, he equated the EU's rulings about Apple's ecosystem to the dystopian short story Harrison Bergeron. Rah, rah, Goliath! Sis boom bah! That was actually just over a year ago, and was in response to the US DOJ antitrust investigation (and didn't mention the EU at all). But, perhaps the fact that you remember it as "just the other day" is a hint that my suggesting "Harrison Bergeron"…

I don't read your blog because your analyses ring true. I read your blog because you are an impactful pundit who I can stomach. Thoughtful people with large followings bore unspoken biases throughout the past and present, and it is my purposeful exercise to engage with the content of one who's alive mainly talks about Apple.

I suspect you have many readers like me. I don't mean that we all disagree with you the exact same way— that would be absurd. I mean that we'll read something sincere but misguided, because that's a valuable element of discourse.

Your Harrison Bergeron allusion wasn't apt, it was memorably cringey, a local extremum. It was ridiculous on its face. We can't know what Vonnegut would think of it, but he might have chosen to write you into Cat's Cradle.

Re: The Website Hacker News Is Afraid to Discuss

#153

Post by llm_nerd » Thu, Mar 27, 2025, 3:55 PM UTC

gehsty wrote: post #106

rezmason wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

He created markdown, does that not tick the programmer / technologist box? Few people will create anything quite as impactful.

Two decades ago. Does that mean his take on smartphone screen size or Blue Sky vs Threads is anything HN in general needs to hear? Probably not.

But I'll bet if he wrote a considered piece on "The Next Generation of Markdown" or something it would do numbers.

I mean, they compared him with Richard M. Stallman, who we know was extraordinarily consequential and influential in technology, but that doesn't mean his takes on oil or judges or whatever matters. I mean, RMS is still plugging away with posts and I've seen zero of them on this site.

Re: The Website Hacker News Is Afraid to Discuss

#154

Post by znpy » Thu, Mar 27, 2025, 4:01 PM UTC

do_not_redeem wrote: post #150

jgruber wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How then do you explain DF ranking #3 from 2007-2021, but dropping to #78 from 2021-2025? Are you saying my writing was significantly more interesting and useful for the first 14 years but dropped off a cliff starting in 2021, and the keen HN audience noticed the change immediately? You're making a perhaps-legitimate case for why DF should never have ranked well at HN. But the data shows that the opposite is true: fo…

I tried a lot of dates and I don't see any step change. I see a gradual decline. 2006-present: 5th 2010-present: 7th 2015-present: 19th 2020-present: 29th Who knows why that is. Maybe HN's audience has changed over the decades. Maybe your writing has. Maybe the novelty factor for Apple content is gone. Maybe there's just more competition for the front page now that HN is more mainstream. I just think it's unlikely th…

> I see a gradual decline

It just seems the guy from DF can't accept that

Re: The Website Hacker News Is Afraid to Discuss

#155

Post by Smylers » Thu, Mar 27, 2025, 4:02 PM UTC

do_not_redeem wrote: post #150

jgruber wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How then do you explain DF ranking #3 from 2007-2021, but dropping to #78 from 2021-2025? Are you saying my writing was significantly more interesting and useful for the first 14 years but dropped off a cliff starting in 2021, and the keen HN audience noticed the change immediately? You're making a perhaps-legitimate case for why DF should never have ranked well at HN. But the data shows that the opposite is true: fo…

I tried a lot of dates and I don't see any step change. I see a gradual decline. 2006-present: 5th 2010-present: 7th 2015-present: 19th 2020-present: 29th Who knows why that is. Maybe HN's audience has changed over the decades. Maybe your writing has. Maybe the novelty factor for Apple content is gone. Maybe there's just more competition for the front page now that HN is more mainstream. I just think it's unlikely th…

That “gradual decline” is an artifact of your maths, in which you're gradually changing the weight of recent years.

Consider a sequence with an extreme drop-off: 100, 100, 100, 100, 40. Taking averages of all the numbers, then all but the first, all but the first 2, and so on, yields: 88, 85, 80, 70, 40. That might look like it includes a gradual decline, but clearly there's nothing gradual in the underlying data.

Re: The Website Hacker News Is Afraid to Discuss

#156

Post by js2 » Thu, Mar 27, 2025, 4:04 PM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #141

doe88 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder can a submitted post be flagged without displaying the leading tag? Because there is definitively something preventing Gruber's posts from reaching the first page although most of his posts are not overtly flagged. But as you say he should ask @dang for more informations.

One of the theories I read somewhere is that there may be a threshold number of user-flags before the title gets tagged as [flagged], but flagging that happens fewer than that threshold still serves to down-weight the article. So there could be a lot of user-flags burying the article before it shows up as [flagged].

It must work that way. When I flag articles and they don't immediately show as `[flagged]`. I would guess the number of flags is weighted by upvotes, maybe (but less likely) by the karma of the person flagging the article. The software must track who flags articles since you can lose flagging privilege if you do it frivolously:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12173809

As far as I know, once an article is flagged it cannot become unflagged by user action. Only dang can unflag articles he thinks the community deserves to discuss.

Articles can also become `[dead]` which I think happens automatically for submissions detected as spam. Per dang, users can vouch for such submissions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43268468

Re: The Website Hacker News Is Afraid to Discuss

#157

Post by kemayo » Thu, Mar 27, 2025, 4:13 PM UTC

rezmason wrote: post #62

graeme wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt you intended it, but your comment actually exemplifies why a lot of his articles likely get flagged and downranked. The comment is contentious, and also asserts that it is per se impossible for someone to disagree with the EU's stance on interoperability in good faith or that there may be legit downsides. Then you deliver an extended personal attack for some reason. And one that really doesn't seem supported…

Thanks for bringing my attention to the comment guidelines, I'll try to keep to them in the future. I assure you, I do write here in good faith. I'm open to listening to those who oppose the EU's position on Apple's ecosystem. I draw the line at people comparing Apple's circumstances with those portrayed in Harrison Bergeron. Apple, its developer community and its app ecosystem are unlike anyone in that story, and th…

> But what are his credentials? When he weighs the merits of a programming language, an API, a platform, or anything technical, I want him to speak from experience.

Sure, but he doesn't actually do that very much, does he? Like, that is absolutely not the focus of the blog. He talks a lot about the business of Apple, Apple's products and their direction, and how Apple interacts with various communities.

I don't think someone needs to have an engineering degree to have a valid opinion about the things the EU is telling Apple to do.

Re: The Website Hacker News Is Afraid to Discuss

#158

Post by do_not_redeem » Thu, Mar 27, 2025, 4:15 PM UTC

Smylers wrote: post #155

do_not_redeem wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried a lot of dates and I don't see any step change. I see a gradual decline. 2006-present: 5th 2010-present: 7th 2015-present: 19th 2020-present: 29th Who knows why that is. Maybe HN's audience has changed over the decades. Maybe your writing has. Maybe the novelty factor for Apple content is gone. Maybe there's just more competition for the front page now that HN is more mainstream. I just think it's unlikely th…

That “gradual decline” is an artifact of your maths, in which you're gradually changing the weight of recent years. Consider a sequence with an extreme drop-off: 100, 100, 100, 100, 40. Taking averages of all the numbers, then all but the first, all but the first 2, and so on, yields: 88, 85, 80, 70, 40. That might look like it includes a gradual decline, but clearly there's nothing gradual in the underlying data.

Right you are, good catch. Here it is broken down by year then.

I still don't see a step change. 2022 was bad, but not as bad as that slump in 2015-2016.

Re: The Website Hacker News Is Afraid to Discuss

#159

Post by rezmason » Thu, Mar 27, 2025, 4:19 PM UTC

JKCalhoun wrote: post #136

rezmason wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> John Gruber can be thoughtful and form his own opinion while still being an Apple shill. Cannot parse. Maybe using the word "shill" is putting too fine a point in it?

Maybe. I landed on "shill" because it's a word he chose, and it seemed to fit when I read it. Let me try and define what it means, and how it's different from an advocate, an apologist or a sycophant.

A shill promotes something to others partly because that thing's success aligns with their prosperity. That causal chain motivates them to look past the thing's flaws, the people it negatively impacts, and the merits of its alternatives. If we're talking about an org with a stance or policy, the shill is incentivized to align with the org's stance over the stance of its competitors, its customers, and even the org's previous stances, because it's the org in its current incarnation that rewards the shill. However, if the org does something to jeopardize its relation to the shill's prosperity, the shill can criticize the org. Pom poms are optional.

Can someone with intelligence and an open mind be a shill? I emphatically believe so. Well-working minds and hearts can compartmentalize, rationalize and internalize. They can strengthen cognitive dissonance. The incentive to shill can live snugly in that habitat.

Sidenote— In my personal opinion, if there were slightly more or louder John Grubers in the world, there'd be far fewer John Calhouns.

Re: The Website Hacker News Is Afraid to Discuss

#160

Post by llm_nerd » Thu, Mar 27, 2025, 4:22 PM UTC

llm_nerd wrote: post #111

graeme wrote: post #16

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…

>I'm a big John Gruber fan 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.…

Pushed to the negatives? Outrageous!

I'm writing a "Why HN is conspiring against me: Earlier posts did well, but this one didn't" essay and will promptly submit it to HN. It had better do well!

I feel like Gruber fans are brigading this posts and the voting is very unfair. Stop the count!

EDIT: While I wrote this comment out of humour it turns out that Gruber is quite literally funnelling his readers to this submission from his blog. So...hint of truth.