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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

#271

Post by jgruber »

philipkd wrote: post #243
jgruber wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My thesis is that HN would like you to think their moderation is highly transparent, and it's very clear that the core HN audience believes that to be true, but that in fact it is not transparent at all. If the problem is with my writing "being not that interesting or useful and also contentious", how then do you explain Daring Fireball ranking #3 here from 2007-2021 but dropping to #78 from 2021-2025. Do you think m…

I'm a fan of both HN and DF. If I assume my worldview is accurate, that both are above-board, then the only explanation I have left is flamewar detection. Your links get too many comments—plus some flags sprinkled in there—too fast relative to upvotes. So, your posts get too much engagement. There is a twisted logic to that algo, esp. for a "News For Nerds. Stuff That Matters"-flavored attitude, and esp. for a site t…

This is fantastic, and I'm embarrassed I didn't think to do this year-by-year analysis myself. But then how do you square up the tepid response here to

https://daringfireball.net/2025/03/something_is_rotten_in_th...

Re: The Website Hacker News Is Afraid to Discuss

#272

Post by js2 »

jgruber wrote: post #269
js2 wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I don't think it was suppressed by a "a cabal of moderator/admins". I think it was flagged by regular HN users who think you're a dicknose[^1][^2].

Regardless, none of us can tell you for sure. Only dang knows. Why don't you ask him?

[^1]: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/08/ill-tempered

[^2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3019147

Re: The Website Hacker News Is Afraid to Discuss

#273

Post by spopejoy »

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?

Have to say, you copy-pasting this response over and over in this thread tells me a lot about your writing without ever having read a single one of your posts:

- You ask leading questions with questionable assertions. E.g., I doubt that for every moment of a 14 year period you were the unquestioned, constant #3 hotness on HN (I've been here for most of that and didn't see a single one?), yet you present this as uncontestable fact.

- You demand that somebody answer the question you think is most interesting instead of addressing the content of their post

- You don't see obvious things in your communication that people might find not really offensive as much as boorish and uninteresting.

Re: The Website Hacker News Is Afraid to Discuss

#275

Post by planetwilson »

ttepasse wrote: post #175
jgruber wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

For anecdotal feedback I'm taking myself as an example, although I don't flag, I just don't upvote anymore. (At the same time I think there is a flag problem on HN. I'd recommend /active for a better view into HN discussions.) Historically I should be your target group, I'm a Mac user since it was uncool (and tribal), I think I have DF in my subscriptions since NetNewsWire 1. But I'm just not interested anymore, I fe…

There is the Files app which supports SMB as well as hooking up with all the major cloud file providers. There's not really much difference to doing it in Android at this point.

Re: The Website Hacker News Is Afraid to Discuss

#276

Post by jachee »

thomassmith65 wrote: post #80
epaga wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree! To be clear though it is not some backend thing by dang etc. but rather users with enough reputation to get the flag button are flagging your posts just because they don’t like you. That is the likeliest explanation.

The apparent 'ban' may related to the site's popularity. Who knows how the algorithm here works exactly, but people submit daringfireball links regularly... ...and few HN users would like HN to function as a link aggregator that just shows a random selection of the same dozen sites, day after day. One solution would be to penalise domains a little the more frequently they are submitted. Seems like a plausible explana…

The frequency with which Wikipedia links hit the front page sorta bucks this idea.

Re: The Website Hacker News Is Afraid to Discuss

#277

Post by someothherguyy »

minimaxir wrote: post #263
someothherguyy wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, just looked wrong, didn't check the docs

Re: The Website Hacker News Is Afraid to Discuss

#278

Post by thomassmith65 »

jachee wrote: post #276
thomassmith65 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The apparent 'ban' may related to the site's popularity. Who knows how the algorithm here works exactly, but people submit daringfireball links regularly... ...and few HN users would like HN to function as a link aggregator that just shows a random selection of the same dozen sites, day after day. One solution would be to penalise domains a little the more frequently they are submitted. Seems like a plausible explana…

The frequency with which Wikipedia links hit the front page sorta bucks this idea.

That may be right. Unfortunately, while I have seen Wikipedia articles on HN, my memory is not sharp enough to recall for how long they stuck around on the front page.

Re: The Website Hacker News Is Afraid to Discuss

#279

Post by rognjen »

Entirely anecdotally, I have daringfireball in my RSS reader and I read it a lot more a few years ago than now.

Might be that I changed, might be that the content changed.

I feel that my preferences are generally quite aligned with the bulk of HN readers...

Re: The Website Hacker News Is Afraid to Discuss

#280

Post by philipkd »

jgruber wrote: post #271
philipkd wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a fan of both HN and DF. If I assume my worldview is accurate, that both are above-board, then the only explanation I have left is flamewar detection. Your links get too many comments—plus some flags sprinkled in there—too fast relative to upvotes. So, your posts get too much engagement. There is a twisted logic to that algo, esp. for a "News For Nerds. Stuff That Matters"-flavored attitude, and esp. for a site t…

This is fantastic, and I'm embarrassed I didn't think to do this year-by-year analysis myself. But then how do you square up the tepid response here to https://daringfireball.net/2025/03/something_is_rotten_in_th...

Yeah, I can only speculate on that one. It was a well-written, high-level epiphany, that, as you mentioned on the podcast, was purely editorial. It was one of my favorite DF posts, but I don't think everybody got it.
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