The Website Hacker News Is Afraid to Discuss
daringfireball.net
daringfireball.net
From first glance there's still some decent traffic on Daring Fireball submissions, even inside the times Gruber asserts deadweighting.
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_datetimeLooking 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.
From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
How are stories ranked?
The basic algorithm divides points by a power of the time since a story was submitted. Comments in threads are ranked the same way.
Other factors affecting rank include user flags, anti-abuse software, software which demotes overheated discussions, account or site weighting, and moderator action.
I expect there's been an increase in user flags.
BTW "Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."
Same rule applies for submissions.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
FWIW, I'm a regular reader of your blog and have not flagged any daringfireball submissions. But this article is asking to be flagged. It's a needlessly provocative title and not all that interesting to discuss.
I'd also like to point out a bit of hypocrisy on your part. You don't accept comments on your site. If you want folks to comment on your blog, maybe reconsider hosting the comments yourself?
https://shawnblanc.net/2007/07/why-daring-fireball-is-commen...
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/06/16/powazek-comment...
But as you say he should ask @dang for more informations.
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:
Something really in the water the last few years in tech circles. Or maybe just disgruntled as the stock compensation infinite money printer has ended.
Determining that scientifically is going to be near impossible.
Kinda like convincing people to adopt Slashdot's moderation and meta-moderation lol.
Some of it just feels like a small part of a constellation of cultural/society/business leader behavioral changes which are the natural pendulum swing overcorrection from peak +D sentiment in summer 2020 going back to the other end.
This cycle has basically continued ever since Reagan.
Yet there isn't much reward for any fixing.
Which as always, is such a tell from those supposedly all about free speech and no censorship. You have Elon banning whomever he disagrees with or makes him look like a fool, press kicked out or people/companies critical of Trump essentially blackmailed. It's dangerous.
Agreed. (Change in the user base, or in the sentiments of the user base.)
That user base, and its apparent coordination (directed, or emergent), is the main reason I don't engage as much here any more. It's a dirty pool.
1. There was an exponential increase in people talking about FOSS, leveling out in 2021.
2. There's been an exponential decrease in people talking about startups, leveling out in 2021.
With that in mind, remember that there are karma gates to flagging and that you need many fewer flags than upvotes to sink something. My suspicion is that HN had a pretty big culture shift starting around 2016 but really peaking by 2021 that shifted from the old startup, builder focus to its current FOSS, anti-authoritarian mood. In other words the culture that used to be on Slashdot and technical subreddits found its way back onto HN. While the older HN was more homogeneous in its makeup and narrower in its topics it was also a lot less contentious than today's HN is, mirroring the culture found on Reddit and comment sections of tech-focused publications like The Verge. Today's HN is broad, unfocused, and a lot more like a mix of r/technology and r/programming than it used to be.
Flaggers, I suspect, have older HN values. They preferred the narrower focus of the old site and really dislike the highly contentious big comment threads that are on today's HN. It's hard to have proof of this since flaggers only interact by flagging, but it certainly is the opinion that I have as an older user well over the karma threshold to flag. As such I suspect we're seeing a culture clash play out where the flaggers are trying to hold onto older HN values while commenters here are engaging with HN in the way it's considered in the zeitgeist today, namely an alternative to tech subreddits.
Maybe the flaggers will keep the site balanced between the two perspectives but I suspect either the flaggers will get tired and churn.
https://medium.com/p/8234e43dbe4c if posted would not get anything, but the actual url that it redirects to https://medium.com/luminasticity/great-products-of-illuminat... if posted might get some.
DF does not seem to have any problem like that, but it just shows there might be issues that one is unaware about preventing uptake of your posts and instead of going about whining just ask Dang and maybe get an answer.
on edit: sorry, misremembered, not all redirects - link shorteners are the issue.
(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 fell off as a regular reader.
Partly it is topical: I'm rather disinterested in inside baseball or opinions on journalism on Apple. "Claim Chowder" as a concept should have staid in the 2000s, I think. My Apple interests are more in the technical details or in the opinions of the wider Indie Devsphere or how people use their technology. Hence Michael Tsai's blog is my favourite Apple blog.
And where you touch an Apple business aspect I'm often baffled by your reasoning. That your Apple-vs-EU-opinions are rather outlier opinions I don’t need to recap, although I found the tone of your language sometimes going in an off putting weird direction, almost as if those Europeans should not allowed to give themselves laws.
But even when I share the complaint of a critical article of yours there is a fundamental disconnect. Taking your recent "Rotten" post: You closed the article with the hope of someone berating the lower ranks of Apple like Jobs did with MobileMe. I found that sociopathic by Jobs then and I find the suggestion absurd today. Telling the slaves to row harder has never motivated someone, I think.
And even if, the software problem at Apple is managerial. Senior management invented the annual releases, probably for the Christmas season. Senior management started to announce features in advance, pushing them back more and more in the release year. Senior management releases features before they are ready. In my opinions the directly responsible individuals are Federighi and Dye, as good as that hair may be. And for all of it: Cook himself.
Plus: Apple's position has fundamentally changed. Instead of an upstart, it is a trillion-dollar-behemoth. That changes how we look at the company. And the company has deeply changed, like all tech company they become more vertical and insular in their services (“Feudal” is a wrong metaphor, historically speaking, but it goes to an emotional truth). Why should we root for them anymore?
Recently I tried helping someone to get a file from a PC to their iPhone. The best options were either weird file sharing services or an USB stick like a barbarian. I blame Apple. I remember a time when computers could talk to each other, based on shared, open technical standards. Of course I blame Apple.
Those… aren’t even close to the best options. Hell, if they have iCloud it’s a simple upload on a website away at least. There are other easy ways too.
> I blame Apple
Yes, I’m sure you do, taking responsibility is hard for some people.
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 not saying it's a conspiracy or anything. perhaps it is just users flagging his articles and not some concerted moderator action.
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.
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.
Before the years in which you cited his posts were still 100% tech.
So, to recap: your hypothesis is that a perceived shift in focus in January 2025 retroactively affected his placement on HN in previous decades? Does this involve time travel?
https://daringfireball.net/2025/03/something_is_rotten_in_th...
You're "just asking questions" and inventing percentages. The above example is pretty clear.
I bet his overall blog traffic has dipped
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)
- Daringfireball.net: 1M
- CosmicPython.com: 72K
- Caryinstitute.org: 92K
- 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.
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...
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 criticize Apple as evidenced by his recent article on the State of Cupertino.
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.
I've seen this same pattern happen with other topics where an article doesn't match the zeitgeist, even it the article itself is not flamebait. I think the Something Rotten in the State of Cupertino should have been at the top of Hacker News.
But overall the algorithm has kept HN an interesting place. Any good moderation policy has side effects and tradeoffs.
Dang would be the one to know, but it looks to me there's an innocuous explanation here. As for transparency, it's always frustrating to have it. But transparency in algo's invites gaming of those same algo's (and I don't mean by John). So I wouldn't expect the HN modteam to publish details about their algo.
Edit: since I posted this, the article was flagged. Which I think may support the thesis. I will say the mod team might consider a vouch feature for articles the way one exists for users/comments. I think it ought to take a lot of vouching to counteract flags, but there are clearly articles where this is warranted. The OPSec breach this week was one of them (and it was restored).
Prophetic. The Flagaroons have attacked.
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 since they're more likely to contain new information than opinions that are conventional-wisdom-with-a-few-little-sprinkles-on-top." Sometimes the HN audience is very diligent about this norm. Reactions to Gruber's writing from the HN crown often show marked deficiencies in adherence to this norm. I'm not sure what, if anything, should be done about that by Gruber or HN's moderators, but I do believe that the problem is not located in Gruber's writing.
HN's "professed norms" (i.e., the guidelines) do not state that, and opinions, atypical or otherwise, have zero information content beyond the information that so-and-so holds such-and-such opinion.
Atypical opinions may be, on average, more likely to be accompanied by intellectually interesting arguments, but that's, at best, a loose correlation, not an iron law that where one thing occurs the other will also.
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.
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43150182
2: Their exact word
I suspect this is it. A subset of users flag and/or downvote daringfireball on sight if it reaches the front page and the HN algorithm treats that as a strong single
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. What does John think about screen sizes (e.g. 3.5 inches is the "sweet spot"), or Mark Gurman, the EU, etc.
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.
I would also argue it's the laziest content to write. The whole blog-rush were millions of people spinning up blogs to give their hot take on Current Zeitgeist Thing, but then it turned out that more people want to write that than read it so it faded away.
But because there were numbers of fans here, every Gruber opinion would shoot to the top of HN. It takes a tiny minority of HN users to make a story hit #1 -- right now the top four stories have barely dozens of upvotes -- so it would happen again and again and again, and people would click through and see an opinion about some thing and click back and they'd have no down arrow. Nor does the site weight "click throughs but didn't vote up". So people flag. Eventually, I presume, a domain downranking was applied.
Daring Fireball isn't the only domain like this. There are various other "I'm a fan of this guy!" type personalities that would constantly top HN despite the content arguably not deserving it. Content that if it came from anywhere else would be considered blog spam. Content that could literally be just a comment on HN.
There is another comment that opines that they want to see more daringfireball content on HN. I mean, they could just visit his site, or they could just hit https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=daringfireball.net, but what they really seem to mean is that they want everyone else to see more content from DF.
It's also ridiculous how people keep trying to make this an anti-Apple thing. Apple product announcements and technology releases do extremely well on here. Those have a real impact on the lives of most users of HN, whereas DF opinion entries don't.
>since I posted this, the article was flagged. Which I think may support the thesis
Whines about voting/moderation on HN almost always do extremely poorly on here. In this case DF has had multiple multi-hundred upvoted submissions on here over the past couple of months, and the entitlement of actually complaining that every random post doesn't do numbers absolutely deserves to be flagged.
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.
This perspective on opinions doesn't seem accurate to me, e.g., opinion pieces (especially favorable) on Emacs, Neovim, and Blender seem to do really well here. I also disagree with the junk food characterization, I think people taking a strong stance on why they like something is often really valuable.
> There is another comment that opines that they want to see more daringfireball content on HN. I mean, they could just visit his site, or they could just hit https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=daringfireball.net, but what they really seem to mean is that they want everyone else to see more content from DF.
For the record, I personally share things here when I think they're worth discussing, i.e., it isn't because I want people to see something, it's because I want them to talk about it.
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.
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).
I think the explanation here is that HN has taken a hard turn towards Linux/OSS. Not to say those weren't always popular topics, but HN used to be a place for software and hardware generally, with an emphasis on making things, OSS being an obviously important component of that. Now OSS is emphasized more. To illustrate, let's do a thought experiment: Let's say someone in the industry does a detailed explanation of the VFX pipeline for a blockbuster movie, and compare that with an someone doing the same for an indie side-project using Blender. There was a time both of those would have been popular on HN, today I'd only bet on the second making it to the front page. Note I'm not making a value judgment here, just something I've observed.
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 primary steering force of what’s permitted to surface and what gets ghosted. This moderation cabal operates more or less in secret. Their actions, and thus even their usernames, are invisible — lest the HN community discover that it’s steering things about as much as Maggie Simpson is.
Sounds right to me.
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.
Frankly, I find this submission and Gruber's followup insufferable and it makes me want to read him less. I say that as a regular reader of his blog who's purchased several of his t-shirts over the years. But really, these posts alone make me no longer a fan.
And ... while I can understand frustration and disappointment on his end, the long post yesterday, let alone a second post, and apparently now discussion of it on a podcast where he was a guest, is overboard. He often comes across as a touch full of himself, and it's on blatant display here. Don't blame anyone for being turned off.
All I can say is that I found this particular DF post annoying and narcissistic to the extreme. I'm glad it was flagged.
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 team.
But whether there is one seems much clearer. Daring Fireball submissions perform very poorly, the notable one that should have been #1 by any measure was "Something is Rotten in the State of Cupertino".
Might be the most notable Apple article of the decade. That it wasn't number one suggests negative site weight. Which, I'll repeat, is explicitly within the public guidelines for how the site is run. Not a paranoid conspiracy. I doubt the mods would comment on specific site weights as that would open a whole can of worms. Which is frustrating for sites, but I can't think of any social media algo that's public.
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 posts, frankly. They are opinion pieces. Comments on opinions pieces usually take the form of flame wars or are simply too uninteresting to have much to say about. Same for the other bloggers he mentioned who think they are also being downweighted.
I don't agree his "something rotten" post was worthy of #1. After I read it (independently of HN), I sorta nodded along but never thought to submit it here.
There's only 28 comments on it, none very interesting;
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43348891
It only got 176 upvotes. That said, it's clearly lower than other submissions from that day, ending in the 88th position. I can't find any lower ranked submission with even close to that score:
https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2025-03-13&p=3
Also, geez, people sure do spam his posts to this site:
https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=daringfireball.net
So maybe it does get down weighted due to all the repeated submissions.
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
Guarantee you it's more popular than the million "nautil.us" or whatever junk posted here.
If all Dang did was deny, then yeah, it would be quite reasonable to not trust him. But presumably Dang is able to provide a reasonable alternative explanation and has the receipts to back it up.
>Other factors affecting rank include user flags, anti-abuse software, software which demotes overheated discussions, account or site weighting, and moderator action.
It's very plausible to me that there IS a negative site weighting to DF. But that it might come from the aggregate history of flags or angry/contentious comments posted on DF articles.
It certainly could be a personal moderator thumb on the scale, but at the scale of HN I'd expect they have some automated formula for site weighting based on the other factors mentioned.
I don't resent the existence of Disneyland, but I probably would if 90% of all outdoor parks I could visit were either Disneyland or Facebookland.
I think you are right. Defending Apple's customer unfriendly policies that forced the EU's hand has turned a lot of people off.
I've been a long time reader of Gruber's, pretty much since he starts. And he's always favored Apple in a way that was reasonable. But the defense of the things Apple does that harms customers is not reasonable, and I think that turned off a lot of his former fans.
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.
HN's crowd has changed since its inception, but again, not in some really abrupt way.
He did start to write a lot about US politics,
which for me is enough to stop reading his blog.
However, that doesn't adequately explain DF articles' swift removal from HN's front page.
On HN's page front page I'd expect article links to sink or swim based entirely on their own individual merit.
The one DF article I remember seeing recently is "Why Can’t We Screenshot Frames From DRM-Protected Video on Apple Devices?" and it seemed like just a fluffy post without any technical info and without any research, just an excuse to dog on other operating systems.
Why do some setups allow screenshots and some don't? His post starts with "I’m not entirely sure" and doesn't get better from there. You can google "what is widevine" and get better info. In reality, different browsers and different OS's are certified to different Widevine levels, depending on whether the content goes through a sufficiently protected hardware path. But in Gruber's world, "streaming services somehow don’t care about what Windows users do" (spoiler alert, they obviously do), and you can take screenshots on Windows because "Windows uses a less sophisticated imaging pipeline" (naturally, because it wasn't created by the sophisticated Steve Jobs!)
These posts are the tabloids of the tech world, and uninteresting unless you need a source to cite to win an argument about why your favorite computer company is morally superior to all the other computer companies.
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: for 14 years it was very popular here.
1. Writing about Apple simply isn't interesting anymore. Nor has it been for close to a decade. They lost me around the butterfly keyboard fiasco.
I know this isn't the full body of your work, but it's plenty of it. As a professional in the tech space for over 25 years, I went from being a devout Apple follower (installed the OSX beta on my Tibook back in the day), to basically not caring. They've gone from being innovative and evolving, and the best mix of Unix+GUI, to just being a system I'm forced to use for work. I'd rather use a Thinkpad/XPS/etc with Linux for anything else.
2. Your writing has gotten dramatically more... cynical over the years? Maybe it's just a side effect of growing older, as I know I have too. But it's also why I stopped blogging on my blog, which was popular enough in enough circles.
Like I said, this is just my perspective, so you can call me full of crap or whatever.
I think this might have a lot to do with it. I considered myself a devout Apple fanboy a decade ago, but every software release and new product they've developed has been less and less interesting. It feels like they're abandoning me as a customer as I get older. And every former fanboy has that one "straw broke the camel's back" moment they can point to where they lost the faith. For you it was the terrible keyboards, for many it was the headphone jack. For me, it was a tiny change: They quietly dropped support for 1080i resolution around the time of macOS 10.5 or 11. Suddenly my Mac that ran my home theater could no longer drive my TV, just because Apple decided "fuck this guy, we're not going to support this anymore."
I still have an iPhone 7. No phone released since then have I really cared about enough to bother upgrading. I don't give a shit about emojis and chat stickers and more annoying notifications that butt into my life.
2006-present: 5th
2010-present: 7th
2015-present: 19th
2020-present: 29th
The Simpsons had far too many seasons, but Matt Groening eventually went on to create Futurama. I hope you figure things out.
It just seems the guy from DF can't accept that
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.
year rank
---- ----
2007 80
2008 13
2009 3
2010 1
2011 2
2012 9
2013 78
2014 14
2015 305
2016 363
2017 7
2018 65
2019 28
2020 7
2021 106
2022 353
2023 86
2024 82
I see it as highly interesting, because the reason as to why is very fascinating. I know that's a problem around here to discuss, but I never understood why.
I’m surprised this post too is already flagged.
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.
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 explanation.
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.
I've noticed that being critical of Musk or Trump is a flag-magnet as well.. I guess either the owners of the site are cough "free-speech absolutists" or there's some concerted effort to prevent criticism of them - the former seems a lot more likely.
Would be nice if someone with access to the backend checked the flagging stats to see if there's a ring of people doing it.
Case in point: In recent months, a lot of recent Trump/Elon posts have been flagged and disappeared from the front page, but still managed to garner hundreds of points and comments. My assumption is that a significant portion of users use hn.algolia.com, circumventing the flagging algorithm. Personally, I've recently found myself using hn.algolia.com (filtering for top stories in the last 24h) more often than news.ycombinator.com.
If your issue was purely flagging-related, your articles should be able to generate engagement. That's why I'm saying I think there is a lack of interest.
Personally, while I appreciate your work, it's become less interesting to me over time. The value of your blog to me is mainly around getting a perspective into how a die-hard Apple fan would think about a certain topic. This was fun in the period from 2007 until some point in the mid-2010s, when smartphones were revolutionary and the iPhone vs. Android ecosystem battle was still relevant. But ever since phones converged into commodities, it just stopped being interesting. No one is emotionally invested in their choice of phone anymore.
Don't take my word for it. Compare the Google Trends for MacRumors [0] and Daring Fireball [1]. Both faced a sharp decline starting in the mid-2010s. It's not a surprise that engagement on Hacker News would mirror those trends.
[0] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...
[1] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...
I theorize this is due to the overall startup versus incumbents focus as well as the hacker ethos of being opposed to more buttoned up closed systems meant for the general public. Like for example recent posts on EU regulation of Apple get generally favorable reactions and little analysis of actual consumer experience impact, of which Gruber is more keenly analytical.
E.g. most of us on HN would generally appreciate having opt-in side loading and whatnot onto our Apple devices, like macOS. So Gruber just sounds like some kind of apologist when he says this would hurt consumers in the large. We more advanced hacker types are quick to say PEBKAC.
But it’s a shame because his analysis actually offers really good insight in how to build successful consumer products the Apple way.
"Knee jerk reactions" presumes that Apple today behaves no differently than it did before when discussions "felt" more civil. That would be pretty far from the truth. Old Apple didn't piss off its developer community for the sake of protecting its walled garden, it didn't launch $3500 baubles nobody can afford and leave it to third party devs to fill the gaps. And the less said about Apple's foray into AI, the better.
So let’s consider this comment with that in mind:
* Meta is pissed off it doesn’t have more user data access inside Apple’s walled garden
* Meta makes more affordable VR glasses
* Meta released a high quality, developer friendly AI model
In other words, these are all Meta-friendly points.
I’m old enough to remember the Mac vs PC days when people would get utterly tribal on the internet about it. Maybe that’s where HN is at now. You can see why a startup focused third party developer community might lean towards busting open walled gardens.
[1] https://apnews.com/article/apple-meta-european-union-digital...
Hacker News and Daring Fireball have so much in common:
1. Both long-running sites 2. Both serve a curious and tech savvy audience 3. Both run zero graphics 4. Both appreciate / provide long-form journalism
They should be fine bedfellows. What's going on?
Would be cool if @dang could check the flagging data in the articles since the massive drop in 2021 and see if there are any patterns (same people doing the flagging for every article).
Something happened in 2021 and mysteriously DF articles just fall off the front page immediately.
See: 120 submission in the past 12 months- https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=daringfireball.net&ki...
multiple submissions with > 100 points.
eg:
* Publishing AI Slop Is a Choice (daringfireball.net) 167 points by mpweiher 10 months ago | past | 76 comments
* Why can't we screenshot frames from DRM-protected video on Apple devices? (daringfireball.net) 173 points by ingve 25 days ago | past | 217 comments
My suspicion: it's not relevant to the HN audience. DF is opinion pieces (mostly) about Apple. While I'm sure many DF readers use some Apple device(s), I suspect many (most?) DF readers do not care about "inside baseball"[0] for Apple.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside_baseball_(metaphor)
My guess is that HN users flag the hell out of DF submissions for whatever reason, and that causes the so-called graylisting. But again only @dang can give you a straight answer.
If you prefer email, Dan can be reached at hn@ycombinator.com. He seems like a friendly guy.
Why is blacklisted or censorship for that domain taken as fact? IMHO the author didn't bring any conclusive receipts either.
But let's be real - it's a hot takes/opinions site. It's basically the junk food of content. The world is absolutely awash in "My opinion" kind of blog entries like DF and they generally do extremely poorly on here, for good reason. There will be nothing technically revelatory in anything written there. Nothing that will really change anything. It's an Apple guy with opinions about stuff. For instance that 3.5" was the "sweet spot" for smartphone screen sizes, coincidentally when Apple's smartphones only had 3.5" screen sizes.
Again, I still read it and sometimes enjoy it -- at least when he isn't on his bizarre Mark Gurman and/or Bloomberg "they are my nemesis" nonsense, which absolutely no one cares about but him.
The shift from past popularity to apparent suppression is interesting, but without concrete proof, it remains speculation. Still, the frustration about opaque moderation resonates with me.
It's unlikely Gruber has published anything so incendiary that HN created a specific ban just for his site.
More likely, there's something organic about Gruber's blog that HN's algorithm dislikes. Maybe its very popularity is what triggers a penalty - maybe due to the rate that HN users upvote it.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/th...
I bet flags weigh more from high karma users. It seems likely that there is a small, dedicated band of anti-DF users with high karma who flag everything.
It probably only takes a few people with enough karma to kill a post, which is consistent with the fact that some posts have a reasonable half life. I don’t think it’s a formal gray list.
Add to that a writing style that is often biased, arrogant and inflammatory and you get even less interesting comments on this site.
Exactly the same for Tim Bray, btw - except for Android stuff.
There used to be a time when this stuff was hot, people took sides and breathlessly read anything they could find about the new stuff being released. That time has passed. We stopped caring.
I can understand the demoting.
I am sure only the moderators have visibility into what's going on here. I would hazard a guess that the user base of HN itself has changed in recent years. It's probably no accident that Gruber points out the ranking shifts in 2021 - a lot of things shifted 2020/2021 due to downstream pandemic impacts.
It's hard to speculate without mod-level visibility though. I'd love for them to weigh in.
If you search or view dang's comments you can see multiple explanations on why and how posts are flagged.
Many people will flag if they think a submission will cause flame. And many people will flag if they see most comments are not constructive and are just complaining about comments. It doesn't make interesting reading. For what it's worth I came here via new comments and the submission was already flagged, so this is for whoever is left!
Check out the usual guidelines:
"Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading." and remember that people like interesting things. Keep this a good interesting place.
Additionally there seems to be an increasing paranoid-like, conspiratorial, us vs them group mentality and accusation of brigading and censorship. This type of thinking are thought terminations and can morally hurt oneself. They don't encourage people to think of others as other people like themselves but encourages people to see more enemies around them and leads to dead end conclusions and prejudice.
From the FAQ: > Other factors affecting rank include user flags, anti-abuse software, software which demotes overheated discussions, account or site weighting, and moderator action.
Gruber also posts more now than in recent memory political observations and commentary. As he's gotten older his blog has expanded beyond just the Apple scene.
While I've always felt DF got insta-banned by fanbois of other tribes regardless of the content of his posts (which should be discouraged here in some way imo) it's quite possible he's got folks on The Other Aisle that insta-flag him simply because they don't like his political views.
If that's what's happening, or it's due to a decades-long disagreement with his taste and views regardless of the posts being submitted, that feels like unwarranted censorship that goes against the grain of HN's guidelines.
(Preempting the only example I can think of, would be Internet Explorer, circa ~2000, which isn't really comparable because no one was defending IE then.)
TikTok?
Meta?
1. The HN audience’s preferences have changed over time
2. There’s way more competition – the amount of great content to share and discuss has increased a lot
3. Gruber apparently does not write as much or as well as he did a decade or so ago (at least according to many Daring Fireball readers I know)
4. Yes, many readers don’t like him, but I would also say that many readers, especially younger ones, simply don’t care about him (related to point number 1)
5. Related to all above, Gruber’s influence and relevance in tech debates have probably declined
Except that #5 is objectively not true. Apple execs pay attention to DaringFireball. What he posts matters for that reason alone.
I’m also not sure you could say you were “consistently” at #3 from 2007 to 2021. That would be like saying you were “consistently” at #5 from 2007 to 2025.
Let’s check other periods:
From 2020 to 2021, you are ranked #13 [1].
From 2018 to 2019, you are ranked #26 [2].
From 2017 to 2018, you are ranked #15 [3].
From 2015 to 2016, you are ranked #179 [4].
From 2014 to 2015, you are ranked #33 [5].
[1]: https://refactoringenglish.com/tools/hn-popularity/?start=20...
[2]: https://refactoringenglish.com/tools/hn-popularity/?start=20...
[3]: https://refactoringenglish.com/tools/hn-popularity/?start=20...
[4]: https://refactoringenglish.com/tools/hn-popularity/?start=20...
[5]: https://refactoringenglish.com/tools/hn-popularity/?start=20...
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.)
"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.
That's a notable trend overall, but not really a problem on its own. Every community is inevitably going to lean a certain way.
But it doesn't really explain the anger. To be blunt, most of the comments criticizing DF/Apple in this thread sound unhinged to me, e.g., like Apple goes around living in these folks head rent free. I have difficulty understanding that mindset with something you can so easily avoid just by buying a product from another company? E.g., there are countless companies whose values don't align with my own, so I don't use their products, and that's the end of it. Why are these folks spending so much of their energy on hating this company that they can so easily avoid? And why is it just Apple that garner's this hatred, e.g., why not Nintendo for example, a company with a similar approach overall (closed, emphasis on product experience over specs) for example.
Not rent-free. 30% in the App Store. And 100% in the PWA they don't let me ask users to install.
I want to make software to users of smartphones, not to Apple users. There is nothing related to values. Gatekeeping the whole apps ecosystem for their own profit isn't a value anybody should share besides the shareholders.
Also be curious what you think of console makers like Nintendo who have a similar approach regarding revenue cuts and access as Apple? Specifically why is there so much hate at Apple using this model but not Nintendo?
About Nintendo, I don't develop games nor play them, I couldn't care less about what the market leaders do.
Why can't you just develop for Android or Palm or Windows and be happy while leaving us alone to enjoy what we like? Can you at least appreciate the irony of calling Apple greedy when your main beef is they get in the way of you making money?
Also:
> Initial reviews of the much-anticipated iPhone X appeared on October 31, but I’d only had the phone for 24 hours when the embargo dropped
Having Apple hardware before official launch (when review embargo is still on) tells me that the author will never publish bad press for apple, and is not to be trusted on reviewing Apple hardware.
Apple is know for stopping shipping pre-release hardware to people that are honest in their review and that might call out questionable choice.
The guy from unbox therapy said this pretty explicitly: when he started questioning apple's hardware design choices they stopped inviting them to their events and stopped sending them pre-release items.
You can see something similar in mkbhd's videos where he's pretty much constantly walking on thin ice. He says and doesn't say stuff. My gut feeling regarding him is that he can get away with some of that because of his large audience.
I've been doing this for a long time and I'm not aware of a single case where this has happened. I'd love to write about this, so please let me know which reviewers, who had previously been seeded with review unit hardware from Apple, were dropped after they wrote honest review. (I don't think what you're describing is, in any way, an accurate description of Apple's relationship with Lewis Hilsenteger.)
But I can’t seem to find that comment here on HN that references how Apple articles get downranked.
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 their missteps, while simultaneously maintaining meticulous, years-long grudges against anyone who makes incorrect predictions about Apple.
There's a stark difference between having perspective as an enthusiast and being a reflexive apologist. The "Something Rotten in Cupertino" piece is the exception that proves the rule - a rare deviation that doesn't erase the pattern of selective criticism that's defined his work for years.
What's particularly frustrating is the pretense of even-handedness. I'd respect the work more if it were openly presented as Apple advocacy rather than positioned as independent analysis. The community's collective flagging behavior isn't "censorship" - it's quality control from readers who've recognized this pattern.
HN's algorithm isn't suppressing contrarian viewpoints - it's responding to content that consistently fails to meet the intellectual honesty this community values.
Having an opinion and a tendency is not dishonest, and there’s plenty of garbage content that reaches and remains on the front page.
Your hypothesis is falsified.
Where I think we agree is that John Gruber (JG) is 99% Apple's "ideal customer", while most HN readers are not: just like Apple he cares a lot about "nice things", "it just works", "the best experience" etc. even if it comes at the expense of price, consumer choice, open specifications, interoperability with other ecosystems etc. So we can intellectually disagree with JG when he defends some proprietary thing Apple built, but when JG writes that he loves that he himself is at least honest (and not an "apologist").
Where we probably disagree is where he (in your eyes) "vociferously defend Apple's every decision". I think JG is often not defending Apple, but just explaining why they are doing the wrong/bad/weird thing. Similarly to how a newspaper can explain why Putin thinks he's in the right invading Ukraine: they are explaining the reasoning, not defending it.
So we have a man that loves most of what Apple does because of an aligned view on what consumer tech should be, and "kremlinologizes" even when his views and Apple's might differ. Which gives the impression of a total apologist. Maybe (if he cares) JG could indicate a little better the times he's explaining Apple, not defending it.
I'd say their positive image though has lost a good
deal of its shine since their peak.
Many/most people in tech have to deal with Apple in some capacity even if they're not users or "fans", such as making sites/apps work on Apple platforms.
It would be difficult to lean in harder than this one does. For me, this is a sign to tune out. Not above drama, but I prefer it in media that activate a wider range of emotions.
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...
This is #9 on the active page but nonexistent on news. I get a sense that active has more interesting content these days. I think folks are way more sensitive this year and react with downvotes and active shows that content.
In some sense I think having an open mind and partaking in active discussions rather than just popular ones that please everyone is a better path forwards.
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.)
> But if you look at the last four years, from 2021 through 2025, Daring Fireball ranks #72.
> Maybe I’ve lost my fastball, and I just don’t write so good no more. Or maybe it’s not me, but the Hacker News audience that has changed in recent years.
The last four years are the outlier to his popularity on HN, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that DF posted a lot of politically-charged takes during this timeframe, including opinions about covid, vax mandates, Ukraine, Israel/Palestine, Elon, and Trump.
I suspect his takes frustrated many of his long-term readers, leading to less sharing and more flagging on HN - maybe by users with more influence - coupled with the site’s opaque algorithms/weightings picking up on the negative sentiment.
* https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/03/27/youll-never-gue...
Given the amount of stupid things that end up on this site, this is asinine.
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.
I stopped abruptly when posts and tweets became (to me) shockingly pro Israel and excused/justified/diminished the ongoing genocide in Palestine.
I understand the situation in Israel is complicated, and there is a strong relationship between the US and Israel, but as a citizen of a former occupied nation I can not stomach any attempts to rationalize the genocide happening in Palestine.
But John, your cheerleading for Israel's genocide --- man. Way before the election of the current cheerleader-in-chief for that effort, you were ahead of the game.
You said that students who protested this genocide should be expelled from college (you've got a friend in the White House now, John!):
> These students should be expelled from college, not placated.
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2023/10/19/violence
And, most sickening of all, you cheered the indiscriminate pager attack that maimed children, which your friend in the White House has now got a golden pager memorializing:
> This whole operation sounds like it would make for a great movie.
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/09/17/israel-hezbolla...
I could go on, but the effect was heartbreaking. My old friend, the voice in my little Pasadena apartment all those years ago, clapping for the maiming of children and howling for the expulsion of students who disagree with him? Who was this guy? Who is this guy? Had I read him wrong the whole time? Had I changed --- would I have loved those blown-up Lebanese kids back in 2002, and now I'd gone soft? I don't know. But if I'd visited DF for the first time in 2003 and found content calling for the expulsion of Iraq War protesters, I don't think I'd have made a second visit.
I know that stubbornness and misplaced pride go hand in hand, but it’s harming the both of them.
I would definitely read DF more often if I didn’t have to use Safari’s reader mode just to be able to read it.
It is then easier to see what is going on. You follow or ignore a thread whether the upvotes and downvotes are from "your kind of people"
It is then easier to see what is going on. You follow or ignore a thread whether the upvotes and downvotes are from "your kind of people"
Did DF ever allow comments on its own website? I vaguely remember gruber once saying: “If you want to comment on my blog, write your own blog.”
> What bothers me is that it’s unexplained. Which, ultimately, seems not so much censorial as just cowardly.
Huh.
Not that I'm aware. There's some discussion about it in this post from 2010:
> You write on your site; I write on mine. That’s a response. I don’t use comments on Wilcox’s site to respond publicly to his pieces, but somehow it’s unfair that he can’t use comments on my site to respond to mine? What kind of sense is that even supposed to make?
Also, by not hosting my own comments, all public commentary on my writing is thus out of my control. I don't get to block comments I don't like here, or on Mastodon, or Twitter/X, or Bluesky. I think that's actually for the better.
DF is a blog and was conceived that way. HN is a discussion site. The two forms (blogging and internet discussions) are different. They serve different purposes and require different management styles.
The discussions here do seem to be tamped down in some ways, and as a user, that takes something away from the experience.
Relatedly: in general, I think "hypocritical" is not a big gotcha that ends discussions. Different things serve different purposes.
OP’s submissions are likely not popular because of a mixture of them being not that interesting or useful and also contentious. Contentious submissions get massively reduced in visibility automatically. And stuff like an iPhone review significantly after other mainstream reviews is just not that interesting.
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 my writing was that much more interesting and useful (and less contentious?) for the first 14 years of HN but changed suddenly in 2021?
Or do you think HN's hidden admin moderation changed suddenly around 2021?
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.
But maybe even some light flagging, plus high engagement-to-view ratio (esp. if engagements go many levels deep fast), may cause some "unwanted" content to be buried.
And just to clarify, if enough people flag submissions,
but not enough people, then it can get buried but not get
the "flagged" tag?
As far as I'm concerned it's either that, or explicit moderation action to downweight links to DF and other selected domains.
There is a twisted logic to that algo, esp. for a "News For Nerds. Stuff That Matters"-flavored attitude, and esp. for a site that's trying to be as efficiently managed as possible.
Plus, Scott Alexander noted recently a decline in Substack due to deboosting on X, but also that just too many people are now Substacking, many of whom are good, and a lot who are just clones. And on the Dithering about "Rotten", you and Ben both concur that it feels like a while since either of you went viral. So as soon as a solo blogger blows up, the system quickly co-opts that blend of content into other media channels. i.e., Indie generally doesn't last.
I did a YoY look at your rankings:
2007: #50
2008: #20
2009: #3
2010: #1
2011: #2
2012: #7
2013: #34
2014: #17
2015: #568
2016: #184
2017: #8
2018: #69
2019: #86
2020: #8
2021: #20
2022: #406
2023: #98
2024: #133
2025: #53
(10/9/20XX – 10/09/20XX)
https://refactoringenglish.com/tools/hn-popularity/?start=20...
Something weird definitely happened in 2015/2016, for sure (maybe the start of the anti-engagement algo). But your blog was also crazy popular between the iPhone's release and Steve Jobs' death. That was probably the most dynamic time in Apple's history (post-Sculley), with plenty of controversy worthy of exacting critique (Antennagate, etc.)
https://daringfireball.net/2025/03/something_is_rotten_in_th...