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The Website Hacker News Is Afraid to Discuss

daringfireball.net

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Re: The Website Hacker News Is Afraid to Discuss

#261

Post by micromacrofoot »

jgruber wrote: post #39
minimaxir wrote: post #7

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.

How then do you explain DF being #3 from 2007-2021 and #72 from 2021-2025? It’s clearly not blacklisted, but clearly is shitlisted, no?

maybe the content just sucks now, much more likely explanation than a conspiracy against him

Re: The Website Hacker News Is Afraid to Discuss

#262

Post by vessenes »

rurp wrote: post #205
alsetmusic wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But overall the algorithm has kept HN an interesting place. Any good moderation policy has side effects and tradeoffs. I don’t think so. From his follow-up: > My thesis is that the above might once have been an accurate summary of how Hacker News functions, but hasn’t been for years, and that there now exists a cabal of moderator/admins with their thumbs on the scale, and their personal predilections are the primar…

I think a simpler theory for this or any site not ranking high is that a small group of users consistently flag the posts, and flags carry a lot of weight. We've seen this more blatantly with Elon articles. Almost any submission that paints him in a negative light gets flagged quickly and rarely makes the front page.

Interesting take. I was going to say any comment that doesn’t pillory him gets downvoted immediately.

Re: The Website Hacker News Is Afraid to Discuss

#263

Post by minimaxir »

someothherguyy wrote: post #251
minimaxir wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The data was retrieved from the public HN dataset on BigQuery: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40644563 SELECT id, title, url, FORMAT_TIMESTAMP("%Y-%m-%d %H:%m:%S", timestamp, "America/New_York") AS submission_datetime, score, descendants as comments FROM `bigquery-public-data.hacker_news.full` WHERE type = "story" AND REGEXP_CONTAINS(url, r"daringfireball\.net") ORDER BY submission_datetime

Should be %H:%i:%S?

%i is not an option. https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs/reference/standard-sq...

Looking it up it's only used in really old DBs.

...but that table reveals I should have used %M instead of %m. Whoops! Although in this particular case it doesn't make a difference. And apparently I can do "%F %X" instead of the whole string.

Re: The Website Hacker News Is Afraid to Discuss

#264

Post by morberg »

jimniels wrote: post #222
minimaxir wrote: post #7

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.

Cool! Made me want to try building it in Quadratic because you can tie the live data source into the spreadsheet. 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 sim…

4 is broken link for me.

Re: The Website Hacker News Is Afraid to Discuss

#265

Post by gehsty »

llm_nerd wrote: post #258
gehsty wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t understand the criticism - he is a journalist who has released very impactful software in his career. I don’t see why HN wouldn’t want to read his take on it, I think you could make the same statement about any career journalist?

What "criticism"? Yes, JG is a great writer (not a journalist, though, by any measure, unless I'm also a journalist for reading nytimes.com this morning and having opinions about things) and his contribution of Markdown was important. That does not mean, however, that his various takes-on-current-thing have relevance for HN. Like looking through the recent submissions of DF entries, it's extremely thin gruel - He tho…

I took this as he did t have a valid opinion on screen sizes, or one HN would want to read.

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

Re: The Website Hacker News Is Afraid to Discuss

#266

Post by micromacrofoot »

JohnBooty wrote: post #215
proline wrote: post #190

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…

You have to also consider a shift in reader affinity, which is impossible to measure

I bet his overall blog traffic has dipped

Re: The Website Hacker News Is Afraid to Discuss

#267

Post by JohnBooty »

micromacrofoot wrote: post #266
JohnBooty wrote: post #215

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…

You have to also consider a shift in reader affinity, which is impossible to measure I bet his overall blog traffic has dipped

(Just to be clear, I'm only interested in this from a perspective of understanding HN, which is a de facto barometer of "which way the wind is blowing" in tech and has a looooot of influence in our industry. If HN moderators are steering that influence far more than is previously known, that's huge.)

That really does not follow, for a couple of reasons.

One:

As Gruber freely admits, maybe his writing just sucks now or HN's interests have shifted away from DF.

This is entirely plausible but if this is the case we'd expect a more gradual decrease of DF engagement on HN and not an abrupt and near-total cessation.

Two:

I do not think that the popularity of "organic" traffic to a website correlates strongly with the engagement on HN. Glance at the HN home page, and what do you see? The overwhelming majority of links are to domains that get an order of magnitude less traffic than DF. The current top two:

    - Getting hit by lightning is good for some tropical trees (caryinstitute.org) (98 points)
    - Architecture Patterns with Python (cosmicpython.com) (369 points)
Here's Similarweb's estimates for traffic to the following domains from 12/24 through 2/25.

    - Daringfireball.net: 1M
    - CosmicPython.com: 72K
    - Caryinstitute.org: 92K
They're just estimates, but have you ever heard of the other two? The relative magnitudes certainly feel more or less reasonable here.

Re: The Website Hacker News Is Afraid to Discuss

#269

Post by jgruber »

js2 wrote: post #248
graeme wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it is. The moderation guidelines explicitly say there can be site weightings. I think it's likely there is a negative site weighting on Daring Fireball and multiple other sites. My guess would be it was algorithmically applied based on past tendency for them to gather early flags or flamewar comments, rather than personal animus. Why there would be a site weight rank is not falsifiable except by the mod…

The paranoid part: "there now exists a cabal of moderator/admins with their thumbs on the scale, and their personal predilections are the primary steering force." What exactly does Gruber think this cabal has against him? He's not that important. The stuff he writes in the grand scheme of things isn't all that interesting. It's a niche within a niche. There's not really even all that much to comment on about his post…

I don't get it. You think my "Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino" piece was not suppressed here on HN?

Re: The Website Hacker News Is Afraid to Discuss

#270

Post by jgruber »

mmmmmbop wrote: post #191

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…

My first retort would be: do you read HN because you think it surfaces articles that are trending in the world at large?
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