221–230 of 305 posts
As someone who's been reading Daring Fireball since 2004 and considers themselves an Apple fan, I think the algorithm is working exactly as intended if it's designed to limit intellectually dishonest content. Gruber has built a career on a predictable pattern: vociferously defend Apple's every decision (even contradicting his own previous positions when Apple changes course), construct elaborate post-rationalizations…
For posterity, here's a spreadsheet of all Daring Fireball submissions to HN, sorted chronologically: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1A7ljmWbHtFsB4VRJ1Q0d... From first glance there's still some decent traffic on Daring Fireball submissions, even inside the times Gruber asserts deadweighting.
I didn’t use the more comprehensive dataset in big query [1] and I didn't use the firebase API [2] either because it's so much data to go through. Instead I used the Algolia search API [3] because it was easy ha.
The resulting charts [4] are, if nothing else, interesting to look at and on first glance similar to what I see in the og google sheet.
Disclosure: I work on Quadratic and this was a good exercise in using the product (and finding bugs). The spreadsheet is available to look at publicly [5]
[1] https://console.cloud.google.com/bigquery?p=bigquery-public-...
[2] https://github.com/HackerNews/API?tab=readme-ov-file
[3] https://hn.algolia.com/api
[4] https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/a97ba432-d6dd-4d1...
[5] https://app.quadratichq.com/file/033d2fa7-b205-4c27-9fce-247...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you looked into how much of DF was about Apple and how much was about Donald Trump during the affected time periods? It seems that you write about tech a lot less and politics a lot more. Which is fine, it's your blog! But don't expect tech enthusiasts to automatically be interested in your opinion on immigration or whatever.
Have you looked into the linked article? That's not what gruber is questioning. 1. Obviously, a political article on DF is a poor fit 2. But DF's non-political articles are also seemingly pooplisted, even ones that are clearly relevant to HN's audience 3. There have been quite a few political articles from other sites that have gotten traction on DF without being pooplisted yeah I dunno it doesn't add up to me. i'm n…
He is a horrible apple shill, but he does have great insight and articulate reasoning on why things are the way they are. We should figure out where the block is and remove it.
It's the kind of articulation you'd see in a McKinsey pitch deck. It's corporate apologia, heavily skewed towards Apple. His takes on Apple's 30% cut and the EU telling Apple to allow third party app stores, tell me he's speaking from the investor's POV than a developer's or consumer's.
As for the EU, the land is devoid of innovation. Whether it's a cure for cancer, AI, a rocket to Mars, or you name it, chances are the next big thing will not be developed there. You can admire them for their socialist healthcare or whatever while still realizing that if the entire world operated like Europe progress would cease and another dark age would start. You don't have to see things in black and white.
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>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.…
> 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. This perspective on opinions doesn't seem accurate to me, e.g., opinion pieces (especially favorable) on Emacs, Neovim, and B…
Years and years ago, absolutely. There would be endless "Why I Love NoSQL" posts, then "Why NoSQL Sucks" the next day, each getting quickly pushed to the top by factions that don't even bother reading it they just agree with the title. That sort of thing gets quickly flagged to death now[1]. If you want that sort of content to do well it often has a lot of work, graphs, examples, evidence, etc, and even then HNers seem to actively detect when sites/authors are trying to use HN as an impression funnel and start to penalize it.
On your specific examples (emacs, neovim, blender) a quick search on hn algolia returns few opinion-type piece with more than single digit upvotes for years. I actually found none but wasn't looking super hard.
HN has shifted, and I would argue for the better. If you disagree with something on here, writing a hot take counterpoint blog entry and submitting it will likely flop. A few personalities using HN as their personal traffic funnel has faded.
>I personally share things here when I think they're worth discussing
DF could add comments, though Gruber rejected them as a distraction from his own writing, so there's that.
[1] One of the flagged posts in /active is a "Why I'm Boycotting AI", which is basically a "take" piece. It can still feed that "that's my opinion" sentiment and see upvotes, but it broadly grows tiring.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. This perspective on opinions doesn't seem accurate to me, e.g., opinion pieces (especially favorable) on Emacs, Neovim, and B…
>opinion pieces (especially favorable) on Emacs, Neovim, and Blender seem to do really well here Years and years ago, absolutely. There would be endless "Why I Love NoSQL" posts, then "Why NoSQL Sucks" the next day, each getting quickly pushed to the top by factions that don't even bother reading it they just agree with the title. That sort of thing gets quickly flagged to death now[1]. If you want that sort of conte…
Compare that to this piece from DF that I submitted that didn't make it to the homepage https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42231308
The former is fine, but says nothing that hasn't been said about Vim a million times before, the latter is a detailed analysis of the way Apple functions from a small angle with huge implications (e.g., acquisitions like Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro continue to be industry pillars).
I don't like disparaging anyone's work the first piece is fine, but this comparison easily illustrates which piece is being treated with the kids gloves, and which sends some folks fuming.
Look to be clear, I love Vim, it's the main app I use to do my work everyday, but it doesn't have the problem where you can't have a rational discussion about it like with Apple.
Hacker News used to the place where you'd have a discussion about whether Apple acquiring Pixelmator has a chance to make it a Photoshop competitor, now instead it's the place where programmer's try to tell photographers that Photoshop peaked in 2007 and that they should really try Krita (so no I don't think HN has "shifted for the better", I miss those conversations).
It's well documented that user flags affect the ranking of stories even before stories are marked as [flagged]. While flagging certainly contributes to the lack of discussion on your articles, I believe that the main reason is that, for the most part, the Hacker News audience is less interested in your take than it used to be. Case in point: In recent months, a lot of recent Trump/Elon posts have been flagged and dis…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you looked into the linked article? That's not what gruber is questioning. 1. Obviously, a political article on DF is a poor fit 2. But DF's non-political articles are also seemingly pooplisted, even ones that are clearly relevant to HN's audience 3. There have been quite a few political articles from other sites that have gotten traction on DF without being pooplisted yeah I dunno it doesn't add up to me. i'm n…
My question was, has Gruber written enough non-political articles to know? Like if the number of high quality, original (many DF posts are just links to content elsewhere), about tech articles is down 90%, then of course his article performance here will be down 90%. And that's before considering that Apple itself may have become less interesting and his writing skills may have slipped (reading too much politics on s…
My question was, has Gruber written enough non-political articles to know?
I counted:
- 25 articles squarely about tech
- 7 about politics, though it should be noted that I counted articles about the Signal leak in this category even though they certainly do involve technology
- 6 that I considered "in the middle"; mostly about Apple's technical choices w.r.t. navigating EU legislation
- 3 "meta" articles about DF sponsorships, podcast links, etc
So yeah, nowhere near "90% less tech articles." Discarding the latter two categories it's 78% tech coverage. And it's not like he was ever 100% tech coverage. It's clearly not sufficient to explain his stuff getting insta-shitcanned off off of HN's front page, and he was getting shitcanned before Trump was elected in 2016 and he ramped up the politics.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My question was, has Gruber written enough non-political articles to know? Like if the number of high quality, original (many DF posts are just links to content elsewhere), about tech articles is down 90%, then of course his article performance here will be down 90%. And that's before considering that Apple itself may have become less interesting and his writing skills may have slipped (reading too much politics on s…
My question was, has Gruber written enough non-political articles to know? It's easy to answer, right? I scrolled down the front page starting at today while watching some opening day baseball. I generally like DF so I was curious if I was just being biased. I counted: - 25 articles squarely about tech - 7 about politics, though it should be noted that I counted articles about the Signal leak in this category even th…
So here's a question- if John himself is a lot less interested in Apple, and now prefers to discuss Trump or sports, perhaps Apple is a lot less interesting? I still follow it closely, but I no longer try to discuss WWDC or the September events with people I know because generally there's nothing that affects them. Their Apple devices work fine and the improvements aren't big enough to discuss with non-enthusiats. Apple is still a great company, but like IBM and Microsoft before, Apple is no longer the center of innovation.