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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

#131

Post by m3kw9 »

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?

I been reader for a long time and this is my observation. From 2021-2025, Daring fireball's article were either boring or very few far in between. Most are either also ran reviews of Apple products, or just rants. The best article he came out with recently was the "something rotten in Cupertino", and is also when I notice a big uptick in frequency of blogs. It was well derserved ranking, or should I say FAIR.

Re: The Website Hacker News Is Afraid to Discuss

#132

Post by ryandrake »

jgruber wrote: post #130
whamlastxmas wrote: post #100

Moderation on HN is probably the most transparent you’ll find anywhere aside from Wikipedia, and HN is better than WP in terms of unbiased moderation. Dang and team have a stellar reputation and the idea that they’re covertly blacklisitng a personal blog is really silly. OP’s submissions are likely not popular because of a mixture of them being not that interesting or useful and also contentious. Contentious submissi…

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 think the overall conclusion from this investigation must be: We'll never know because at the end of the day it's HN's site, and they are the only ones who know how moderation works. They have the logs and (presumably) the materialized dashboards showing what's going on, and we only get a peek at it when the lead moderator (dang) pulls back the curtain a little. He is very friendly, and actually very, very prompt at responding to questions (both over E-mail, and in-thread) but I've always thought the responses about moderation activity are pretty opaque. Any time something that looks like shenanigans gets mentioned, it's always vaguely attributed to "user moderation" or "automated algorithms" such as the flamewar detection, with very few admissions of HN staff putting their thumbs on the scale (in either direction). Best case, if it's true that everything is due to user moderation, it would appear the site is pretty vulnerable to organized brigading (for or against specific topics).

So we'll never know for sure. Please keep writing. I visit here -and- have your site bookmarked because I appreciate the pro-Apple take on tech news, too.

EDIT: Aaaaaaand, in the time that I typed this comment, the article predictably went from normal to user-flagged.

Re: The Website Hacker News Is Afraid to Discuss

#134

Post by robenkleene »

The anger reading the comments here from the folks who don't like DF/Apple is practically palpable, and that's obviously the reason the articles get flagged.

I'm not sure where all that anger comes from (e.g., there isn't any company I've ever been as angry about as some of the commenters on this thread are). I suspect the response I'd get if I asked would be Apple did this or that, but personally, if I didn't like this or that I'd just buy a product from a different company and go about my day. I don't get hanging on to all that anger.

(And frankly, I'd love if someone did what DF does for other platforms, I like hearing from fans of products and platforms what they see in them.)

Re: The Website Hacker News Is Afraid to Discuss

#135

Post by ryandrake »

jgruber wrote: post #117
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.

But the only post on the recent submissions list that is actually marked "[flagged] is this one. If it's because enough high-karma users are clicking "flag", wouldn't they all show up as "flagged"? https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=daringfireball.net

The only explanation I have heard that makes sense is: The [flagged] tag only appears after a certain threshold amount of user-flags, however each user-flag contributes to the down-weight of the story.

So if the [flagged] threshold is 10 user-flags, then 9 people can flag the article, burying it, and then only at the next user-flag, [flagged] shows up in the title.

Of course, nobody but HN staff truly knows if this is how it works.

Re: The Website Hacker News Is Afraid to Discuss

#136

Post by JKCalhoun »

rezmason wrote: post #53
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…

[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?

Re: The Website Hacker News Is Afraid to Discuss

#137

Post by boxed »

timeon wrote: post #83
boxed wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://daringfireball.net/2025/03/something_is_rotten_in_th... Your hypothesis is falsified.

Can you be more specific? Because this article was mentioned in the comment.

If you claim someone is a shill and always talks favorably about X, and there's a big headline article where X is absolutely THRASHED, that falsifies the hypothesis.

Re: The Website Hacker News Is Afraid to Discuss

#139

Post by spenrose »

robenkleene wrote: post #134

The anger reading the comments here from the folks who don't like DF/Apple is practically palpable, and that's obviously the reason the articles get flagged. I'm not sure where all that anger comes from (e.g., there isn't any company I've ever been as angry about as some of the commenters on this thread are). I suspect the response I'd get if I asked would be Apple did this or that, but personally, if I didn't like t…

I suspect it's driven by the Olde School Linux / Free Software contingent of HN commenters / voters. Here is an example[1]:

"The #1 story on Hacker News at 2023:08:21T15:41Z is a 2021 discussion of Linux desktop packaging tools. Hypothesis: HN story up-voters are heavily drawn from Free / Open Source Software folks interested in issues that were broadly discussed in "tech" two decades ago (Linux for the desktop!) and are much less broadly discussed today."

That anodyne observation garnered 5 downvotes. I mean, of course it was silly to treat Linux desktop packaging tools as the most important story in tech in 2023! Overall the dynamic feels like Wikipedia: people who participate are atypical, and nothing annoys them more than one's pointing out that they are atypical.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37211129

Re: The Website Hacker News Is Afraid to Discuss

#140

Post by JKCalhoun »

m3kw9 wrote: post #133

The other problem is that once he went political with his blo, things went down hill for him.

And I was just put off when he starts talking sports....

But seriously, that's a tough one. I get it that his audience are going to be interested in Apple stuff specifically, tech stuff generally, and not expect politics to creep into his blogs. And believe me, I do seek out havens free from the goings-on in the world as well.

But it is also hard for me to imagine having a public forum (as he and other bloggers do) and to simply carry on business as usual as if the world were not spinning out of control (and if you don't think we are living now in extraordinary times I don't know what to say.).

(Geerling guy, what planet do you live on? Oh, that's right, St. Louis.)

(My complete escape from the happenings in the world is to go back and read old computer magazines or electronics magazines on archive.org.)

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