Does hackernews publish its account/site weighting? If not, why not?
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.
Would love to hear from HN on why such an otherwise incredible popular site is so often blacklisted or censored vs what is allowed. Why not let users vote instead like other news? Or if truly not being censored bring receipts on what’s happening?
It's not being blacklisted or censored (see other comment with link to submissions).
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.
This is it for me. I've been using macs since 1985 (!) but I just don't think that blog is very interesting. From what I've seen, you're right that it's mostly Apple "inside baseball" and I just don't care.
100%. But if Gruber/Daringfireball are even shown for a split second, there's a kneejerk reaction to flag it before the flagger even often reads it. It's a shame.
A 'bombshell' to me would include some original journalism, details we weren't otherwise aware of. I read that article, it is basically an essay about a guy realizing that the pedestal he puts Apple on may need some recalibration, just because their AI product sucks. Apple Maps in 2011 sucked too, the company is not immune to putting out crap.
Don’t ask them. The only one who can give you a sure answer is @dang .
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.
the content in the blog is yours, no? So people posting things that would cause flame wars from your domain is still your responsibility? At some point people stop engaging to disagree and start to flag. Your karma doesn't reflect the score expected from the blogger behind the top #3 website of HN. This should tell us something.
Supporting a monopoly like Apple will sure attract a lot of detractors in a forum named "hacker news". The same would happen to Microsoft supporters 20 years ago.
> Your karma doesn't reflect the score expected from the blogger behind the top #3 website of HN. This should tell us something.
Karma's a reflection of how much someone uses HN. Glancing at his account, it looks like he has never submitted anything before this article, and almost never comments. That account having low karma doesn't really tell us anything about him, beyond that he's not a HN regular.
Have you considered the possibility that the world has changed after 2020, and there's more to discuss re: technology and society than whatever Apple is up to? We've had Covid, meme stocks, Jan 6th, Huawei bans, Ukraine, NFTs, stablecoin collapses, Twitter takeover, AI everything, Chinese EVs, Tiktok ban....this list goes on.
> What bothers me isn’t so much that Daring Fireball is shitlisted at Hacker News — even though I really did enjoy reading the commentary on my posts back when they regularly surfaced there, and still do when one slips through the cracks.
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.
> 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?
How is it hypocritical to hold the view that some places are intended to be open forums for comments from anyone, and others are not?
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.
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
...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.
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."
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?
I wonder can a submitted post be flagged without displaying the leading tag? Because there is definitively something preventing Gruber's posts from reaching the first page although most of his posts are not overtly flagged.
But as you say he should ask @dang for more informations.
One of the theories I read somewhere is that there may be a threshold number of user-flags before the title gets tagged as [flagged], but flagging that happens fewer than that threshold still serves to down-weight the article. So there could be a lot of user-flags burying the article before it shows up as [flagged].
It must work that way. When I flag articles and they don't immediately show as `[flagged]`. I would guess the number of flags is weighted by upvotes, maybe (but less likely) by the karma of the person flagging the article. The software must track who flags articles since you can lose flagging privilege if you do it frivolously:
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:
I think from the way stuff is getting flagged & the comments, it's really a change in the user base becoming slowly less techo-anarchist/libertarian and more rightwing/authoritarian curious.
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.
I'd love to see the results of some kind of sentiment analysis on HN comments over time. My hunch is that HN's user base has gotten deeply more rightwing over the years, similar to what's happening in many other online communities. Related to getting more rightwing: I'd also guess (without knowing the data) that the flagging:user activity ratio has steadily grown over the years. HN users are no longer willing to simply downvote comments/articles they disagree with and move on. We are becoming more interested in attempting to silence these comments/articles via flagging.
Pretty much all the stats coming out recently show youth male vote has gone much more +R than in recent history, so could very well be the case of the next gen of SWEs joining HNs and being mad about affronts to orange man.
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.
The natural pendulum swing of “Rs get in govt, f things up, so people get mad at them, elect Dems, who largely stabilize things, and so people forget they got mad at the Rs because they f’ed things up, reelect them because they’re better at lying about their promises, and then the R’s f things up and people get mad at them…”.
This cycle has basically continued ever since Reagan.
> We are becoming more interested in attempting to silence these comments/articles via flagging.
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.
I disagree. Some cursory searches on Clickhouse show me:
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.
one thing that I discovered after spending some time moaning and whining about how people had it out for me is that HN will evidently not allow things to go to the front page to get anywhere that go through a url redirect - so this (humorous satirical example of "great products")
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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 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? 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 social media rots the brain, Google Elon Musk to find out more).
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 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.
In Jan 2025 his archive has 13 articles. 5 were about Trump. One about Pebble was more link than original content. His archive for Jan 2014, Jan 2015, and Jan 2016 is 100% tech. Going from 100% quality content to 54% is a big drop. I'm sure you could get different results focusing on different time periods, but there's a clear shift away from Apple.
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.
Per the article, DF started getting (seemingly) disappeared from HN over a decade ago.
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?
(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.
This touches on the actual reason, IMHO. A significant number of HN users is obviously leaning towards supporting the cult, and of course do the part which cult members are supposed to do - scour the internet for inconvenient speech and then downvote, barricade, and whine.
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.
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 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]
Seems like bikeshedding to bring up typography. The greater matter is refusal to engage in civil, if lively, discussion and instead retreat into prior restraint and helicopter paternalistic declarations of what can and cannot be discussed.
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 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).
"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."
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.
> 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."
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.
This is not at all weird if you are a HN user with somewhat unpopular opinions. The HN guidelines say flag something if it's egregious. People end up treating flagging as a stronger version of downvotes.
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.
People openly admit[1] to abusing the flagging system as their own automated mega-downvote to try to steer[2] the topics towards ones they like and away from ones they don't like.
> 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 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
I doubt you intended it, but your comment actually exemplifies why a lot of his articles likely get flagged and downranked. The comment is contentious, and also asserts that it is per se impossible for someone to disagree with the EU's stance on interoperability in good faith or that there may be legit downsides.
Then you deliver an extended personal attack for some reason. And one that really doesn't seem supported on the merits. Gruber co-created markdown and published a reasonably well received app, Vesper.
I think you're in good faith, and I mean my comment in that spirit. I point out the features of yours to show why the articles may get flagged if they generate comments that go against the spirit of the site.
I think there's a strong case your comment goes against comment guidelines 1, 2, 4, 5, 6 and 7
I glanced at the rest of your comments. None of them are remotely close to this! You're a polite and interesting commentator.
My thesis is that for whatever reason John Gruber manages to draw this style of comment out of people, and that this has increased over time as anti Apple sentiment has grown.
That's not John Gruber's fault and that isn't your fault, it's just the dynamic that emerges.
Thanks for bringing my attention to the comment guidelines, I'll try to keep to them in the future. I assure you, I do write here in good faith.
I'm open to listening to those who oppose the EU's position on Apple's ecosystem. I draw the line at people comparing Apple's circumstances with those portrayed in Harrison Bergeron. Apple, its developer community and its app ecosystem are unlike anyone in that story, and they certainly aren't oppressed rebels. That comparison was an editorial choice made by John Gruber in his coverage of tech news, including a link to a copy of the story he personally typeset. It rang loudly then of sentimental bias, and it's still ringing.
I don't have evidence of the makeup of the Daring Fireball readership, but many of them are at least adjacent to the tech industry, and so his words have incredible reach, Hacker News notwithstanding. But what are his credentials? When he weighs the merits of a programming language, an API, a platform, or anything technical, I want him to speak from experience. Collaborating with Aaron Swartz twenty-one years ago on Markdown is respectfully not very relevant technical experience in the domains DF traditionally covers. Vesper was one ObjC app written by three people in 2013. I'm glad it was well-received, but again, what significance does Gruber's experience have? Why should the industry listen to him when he (admittedly not so often nowadays) discusses software development? If asked, I think he'd strongly agree that people in power should have considerable relevant experience.
PS— the article that began this discussion is, "The Website Hacker News Is Afraid to Discuss". As you can see, I've been eager, not afraid, to discuss the merits of Daring Fireball, though not so eager as to upvote it on HN.
Thanks in turn for the thoughtful reply. I still hold to my own view, but you've dramatically raised the quality of argument I'd have to make to give a satisfying reply. Which is what I think Hacker News should aspire to.
My interest was largely to point out what I saw as the meta trend around discussion of Daring Fireball posts, so I'll leave the debate there or we could be here all night. But I wish you well
On a small point, from what I understand, I think full credits must be given to JG on MD it seems to be his own idea and implementation, my recollection of what I heard him discuss about it on his podcast in the past, was that Aaron Swartz helped him with some ideas and notes.
> But what are his credentials? When he weighs the merits of a programming language, an API, a platform, or anything technical, I want him to speak from experience.
Sure, but he doesn't actually do that very much, does he? Like, that is absolutely not the focus of the blog. He talks a lot about the business of Apple, Apple's products and their direction, and how Apple interacts with various communities.
I don't think someone needs to have an engineering degree to have a valid opinion about the things the EU is telling Apple to do.
Apple's business relies tremendously on its developer relations. If Gruber doesn't regularly navigate that wedge of the ecosystem, then I don't think he can speak with authority on its soundness. I mean I wouldn't!
It's about Apple. It's an opinion piece, where someone's saying that Apple should do a retrenchment OS release where they just fix bugs. It appears to be written by someone who is some combination of a pastor and a professional opinion-haver ("editor in chief").
I don't think there's any metric by which this person's article should be sitting unflagged at the top of the front page, but Gruber's recent something-rotten-in-Cupertino article should get promptly flagged and hidden away.
The parent's point stands. Their comment isn't lacking context, and fundamentally it sounds like we all agree with their argument; the sentiment towards Apple has changed, and the environment these blogposts exist in is not the same. Gruber started blogging in an era when people had hope for Tim Cook, a sentiment that has basically dried up entirely today. The starry-eyed optimism for local-first development is dead in the Apple Intelligence era, and Apple's vision for the future is muddled.
Yes, this is the dynamic that emerges. When trust breaks down over silly things like keyboard reliability and right to repair and third-party app stores and $99/year service fees, people that were once rooting for Apple start to question why we hold out hope at all. It's not Gruber's fault for remaining faithful, but many of his modern articles are out-of-touch with the reality of Apple's situation. It's like performative bewilderment at this point, which this OP article really seems to reflect.
>The comment is contentious, and also asserts that it is per se impossible for someone to disagree with the EU's stance on interoperability in good faith
> it is per se impossible for someone to disagree with the EU's stance on interoperability in good faith or that there may be legit downsides.
Oh, you can definitely disagree. The problem is in good faith which Gruber shows none of. To the point of going from "why the hell would you want to change your Messages default app" to "oh, it absolutely makes sense to chaneg the messages default app but it makes no sense to change Photos, EU is bad" in a blink of an eye.
Two decades ago. Does that mean his take on smartphone screen size or Blue Sky vs Threads is anything HN in general needs to hear? Probably not.
But I'll bet if he wrote a considered piece on "The Next Generation of Markdown" or something it would do numbers.
I mean, they compared him with Richard M. Stallman, who we know was extraordinarily consequential and influential in technology, but that doesn't mean his takes on oil or judges or whatever matters. I mean, RMS is still plugging away with posts and I've seen zero of them on this site.
If RMS or Gruber released code with any frequency, I think the HN community would be very interested. I wouldn't necessarily warm up to either of them, but it would lend a lot of credence to whatever their stances are.
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 thought Bluesky would beat Mastodon, and wants credit for his prediction. Neat, a million people have made this observation.
Apple TV+ is losing money, but Apple thought it would so who cares. Again, utterly irrelevant to this audience.
Siri is bad -- yes, everyone knows. Discussed on here endlessly.
iOS 18 updates re-enables Apple Intelligence -- yeah, we talked about it here a week earlier.
Some executive changes at Apple -- literally just quoting from a Bloomberg article. I mean, this is a pattern across DF where entries are him quoting Fortune or Bloomberg or some tweet and then adding some rejoinder or cheap thoughts.
And it goes on and on. None of this is HN material. It's someone summarizing or giving opinions on actual reporting after the fact. These are basically tweets.
If your content is basically reading tech news and then giving quips or thoughts on some of the news, that sort of stuff just doesn't do well here. And if a minority keep upvoting it, eventually the domain gets down-ranked.
He has had some entries that he put a lot of work and thought into, and they have done well here, even in the past few months. But I assume he looked at the analytics, realized that "blogs" are kind of a fading thing, and decided to try to juice this HN thing as an impression funnel. Which, it should be noted, is pretty funny when you read his posts on Mastodon/Bsky about this, where there his avowed fans saying that HN is just a bunch of poopy head wannabes and it isn't like it used to be, etc. The "it isn't me, it's you" method of self reflection.
He defined markdown 2 decades ago, and the definition had so many problems (ambiguities, etc) that people felt the need to define better definitions like Commonmark.
> Case in point: just the other day, he equated the EU's rulings about Apple's ecosystem to the dystopian short story Harrison Bergeron. Rah, rah, Goliath! Sis boom bah!
That was actually just over a year ago, and was in response to the US DOJ antitrust investigation (and didn't mention the EU at all). But, perhaps the fact that you remember it as "just the other day" is a hint that my suggesting "Harrison Bergeron" as a metaphor was uncomfortable but apt?
I don't read your blog because your analyses ring true. I read your blog because you are an impactful pundit who I can stomach. Thoughtful people with large followings bore unspoken biases throughout the past and present, and it is my purposeful exercise to engage with the content of one who's alive mainly talks about Apple.
I suspect you have many readers like me. I don't mean that we all disagree with you the exact same way— that would be absurd. I mean that we'll read something sincere but misguided, because that's a valuable element of discourse.
Your Harrison Bergeron allusion wasn't apt, it was memorably cringey, a local extremum. It was ridiculous on its face. We can't know what Vonnegut would think of it, but he might have chosen to write you into Cat's Cradle.
Maybe. I landed on "shill" because it's a word he chose, and it seemed to fit when I read it. Let me try and define what it means, and how it's different from an advocate, an apologist or a sycophant.
A shill promotes something to others partly because that thing's success aligns with their prosperity. That causal chain motivates them to look past the thing's flaws, the people it negatively impacts, and the merits of its alternatives. If we're talking about an org with a stance or policy, the shill is incentivized to align with the org's stance over the stance of its competitors, its customers, and even the org's previous stances, because it's the org in its current incarnation that rewards the shill. However, if the org does something to jeopardize its relation to the shill's prosperity, the shill can criticize the org. Pom poms are optional.
Can someone with intelligence and an open mind be a shill? I emphatically believe so. Well-working minds and hearts can compartmentalize, rationalize and internalize. They can strengthen cognitive dissonance. The incentive to shill can live snugly in that habitat.
Sidenote— In my personal opinion, if there were slightly more or louder John Grubers in the world, there'd be far fewer John Calhouns.
A good shill won't always toe the line. That would be too obvious.
A shill should levy just enough dissent to retain some credibility among the most credulous. Usually by piling on to obviously losing causes. For instance if someone were an Apple shill, saying that the App Store review process is broken, the royalty split is untenable, XCode is shite and Apple's AI has been pretty bad are all obvious positions to take. These are blatant, undeniable positions.
Someone could have those public positions and still be a shill.
Is Gruber a shill? I mean, he seems entire dependant upon the Apple fanbase[1] for his income, and a lot of his credibility comes from access that Apple directly grants him. They give him products. He gets to host his "Talk Show" live at WWDC. He has done a number of interviews with Apple executives. He seems pretty firmly attached to the Apple teat and they serve up a supply of nutritious milk for him.
The base post was flagged, presumably because it used the shill label, but it's pretty hard to get away from it. And maybe that's perfectly fine, and the industry has a lot of shills for different things and we all factor in where they're coming from. Most HNers expect a "rose coloured glasses about Apple" perspective from Gruber, so it is weighted against the content.
[1] The Apple fanbase are a subset of Apple users. I'm typing this on an M4 Mac. My iPhone and iPad sit beside me. I'm a subscriber to Apple One Premier. Yet I'm not a fan. I don't, for instance, care at all how much profit Apple makes, much less excitedly gloating about what percentage of the market's profit they make. Nor do I get angry that Samsung copied some UI element or phone shape. Those are fan type topics.
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.
> 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 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.
>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 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.
This is the first thing I found searching for `vim` by date and finding something with enough upvotes to look like it made it to the homepage https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43168781
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've been thinking about this for a long time, and I don't think it's unique to DF. As someone who values design, I've noticing for a long time that it's become harder and harder for design-related content to gain traction on HN (e.g., https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26901208).
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.
> 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 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.
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.
This is paranoid conspiracy-theory stuff. Or it's bait. It's also not falsifiable. Dang can disclaim it but Gruber's next step would just be to write "of course dang would say that."
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.
The treatment of Daring Fireball articles does feel inorganic to me, but if it is, no one who's talking can say whether it's because of mod abuse or a group of users who really hate the site and want to punish it.
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.
I can't comment of DF specifically, but as someone who uses the "flag" link when I think it's appropriate, I see people complaining all the time that their pet topic was flagged/downvoted, and then they instantly go to "the mods"/conspiracy mode, and I'm thinking "I'm just an average HN user, and I just thought the topic sucked or was inappropriate for HN. No 'conspiracy' needed, we just don't like your content."
All I can say is that I found this particular DF post annoying and narcissistic to the extreme. I'm glad it was flagged.
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 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.
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 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;
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:
Gruber's There is something rotten in the State of Cupertino is one of the most excoriating Apple take in years, in large part because it comes from Gruber. Why was this not front page !?
And has been around everywhere else. It's not even defensible. Something is rotten in Hacker News too and unfortunately for the cabal, Gruber wrote a very popular article that shined light into their back room dealings.
Guarantee you it's more popular than the million "nautil.us" or whatever junk posted here.
It's also not falsifiable. Dang can disclaim it but Gruber's next step would just be to write "of course dang would say that."
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.
If someone is putting their thumbs on the scale to suppress Gruber’s articles after he posted that Palestinian civilians being subject to war crimes, denied food, water and electricity was "fucking around and finding out"… well good honestly. Suppress this genocide apologist.
I agree with this explanation. There is a sizable contingent of commenters on here who are just extremely negative on everything Apple. I read most of the big Apple threads and they're just overwhelmingly negative toward the company and, honestly, not very thoughtful. I think this has been a developing trend since I've been on HN. Since Gruber is coming at things from a pro-Apple, but nuanced place, I'm not at all surprised that his articles don't do well.
That’s exactly a topic that I think HN is collectively unhinged about, so I don’t even bother commenting. But I spend a lot of money with Apple and I like everything about their ecosystem, especially the locked down, Disneyland-esque sterile experience on my phone.
I think most people would probably consider that acceptable as a specialty product, but chafe against it being half of a duopoly. And I think it's also grown less and less acceptable to people as Google (and Microsoft, for the other duopoly Apple contributes to) have also become increasingly anti-consumer.
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 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 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.
This is most definitely true but he, and Apple, have always been very polarizing. I don't think either one has become more polarizing? And if so, certainly not in some extremely sudden way that would explain DF's popularity on HN falling off of a cliff.
HN's crowd has changed since its inception, but again, not in some really abrupt way.
(FWIW: While I do generally enjoy DF, my interest here is primarily in understanding HN. I read HN probably 5-10 times a day, whereas I read DF perhaps 5-10 times per month. The near-absence of DF on HN doesn't affect me at all.)
He did start to write a lot about US politics,
which for me is enough to stop reading his blog.
That makes complete sense to me. It would take only a very few "major turn-off" articles to make me remove a blog from my feed and/or stop visiting it directly. Even a 1% incidence of such posts could cause that blog to lose 100% of my traffic.
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.
I thought dang said once that any Apple article gets downranked automatically … and since Gruber predominately writes about Apple, his articles are probably experiencing that.
But I can’t seem to find that comment here on HN that references how Apple articles get downranked.
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.
What irritates some people (okay, me!) about Gruber's blog is that his takes are ultimately milquetoast.
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.
A handful of 100+ comment/upvote submissions in the past month or so alone is not "afraid to discuss". That's hundreds or thousands of eyeballs. And your hot topics might also not be that unique so discussion is happening on other source articles at the same time. Not everything is going to be that interesting all the time. And stuff moves pretty fast around here. Come on now.
He leaves out the possibility of a voting ring. I am 90% certain several such rings exist, or have existed. I believe some rings are topical, some are user ID based, some are site based.
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
I am not sure to be honest, hence “apparently”. It also might be the case that this is less important than the other points I mentioned.
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.
I would like to see more DF on HN. The something rotten in Cupertino was a shattering post—people in my circle who do not read DF were discussing and sending it around, and I work at a place where so many dang people read HN. So I agree with Gruber’s concern.
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.
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.
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"?
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.
Well, if John is correct, it's not too surprising that it is flagged...
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.
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.
Which is a problem and perhaps there needs to be big "resets" of karma when you turn into a cabal. Wikipedia wouldn't work if it was run mostly by people like this, and I am sad to see it going in that direction too.
People on HN are human beings, and there are definitely Apple tribes and non-Apple tribes.
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.
Can anyone name another company that has something similar to a "non-Apple tribe"? And if not, why not? Which is really the question I can't figure out, why Apple makes some folks so angry and the same doesn't happen with other companies.
(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.)
Meta is a funny one, because there doesn't really seem to be a "pro-Meta" contingent. They have lots of users, but not a lot of people who feel warmly about them as a company.
What counts as an unhinged Trump take these days? Is it like "yes, we should invade Canada!" I don't expect anyone to change their vote based on a three sentence HN comment. It's just... it's an amusing accusation that someone's takes on Trump are irrational, when those takes are about the wackiest POTUS in history.
It’s not just Gruber. As both a medium-high HN karma person and a Gruber fan I can say there is a definite reduction in the overall quality of discourse around Apple news versus general topics on HN. Much more knee jerk reactions.
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.
> I can say there is a definite reduction in the overall quality of discourse around Apple news versus general topics on HN. Much more knee jerk reactions.
"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.
You know this comment made me realize something. Apple and Meta are basically in an escalating Cold War. Apple recently singled out Meta as the number one requester of privacy-sensitive APIs and beneficiary of EU-mandated broader access for 3rd parties. Meta responded by calling Apple “anticompetitive“ and lobbying for government intervention.[1]
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.
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 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.
I didn't say that intellectually honest content bubbles to the top, I said: "I think the algorithm is working exactly as intended if it's designed to limit intellectually dishonest content". There's a difference.
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.
I want to start off by seeing I totally get your point. Still I disagree.
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.
You're right — I mean I shouldn't't have used the word 'popularity'. I'd say their positive image though has lost a good deal of its shine since their peak.
I'd say their positive image though has lost a good
deal of its shine since their peak.
I don't necessarily disagree, but I'm also not sure that this would lead to a decrease in engagement. I could very easily see the opposite being true -- more discontent equals more engagement.
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.
Revisiting "incorrect predictions" is a great way to learn about the error's in one's thinking and grow as a person. If your way of dealing with incorrect predictions is to pretend they never happened, then that learning can't happen. He doesn't have "meticulous, years-long grudges" against anyone who has made a bad prediction and learned from it. He does do it to people who refuse to admit they've ever made a mistake (eg the Bloomberg guy) or people who purposely make mistakes to pump and dump Apple's stock (Trip Chowdhry). To me that's fair game.
304 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 348 ms ] threadFrom the FAQ: > Other factors affecting rank include user flags, anti-abuse software, software which demotes overheated discussions, account or site weighting, and moderator action.
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.
I've only ever submitted one article of my own to Hacker News. This one.
Supporting a monopoly like Apple will sure attract a lot of detractors in a forum named "hacker news". The same would happen to Microsoft supporters 20 years ago.
Karma's a reflection of how much someone uses HN. Glancing at his account, it looks like he has never submitted anything before this article, and almost never comments. That account having low karma doesn't really tell us anything about him, beyond that he's not a HN regular.
Why is blacklisted or censorship for that domain taken as fact? IMHO the author didn't bring any conclusive receipts either.
Not that I think flagging isn't already weaponised.
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:
https://daringfireball.net/2010/06/whats_fair
> 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.
From first glance there's still some decent traffic on Daring Fireball submissions, even inside the times Gruber asserts deadweighting.
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.
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...
https://daringfireball.net/2010/06/whats_fair
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:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43268468
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.
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:
Here's Similarweb's estimates for traffic to the following domains from 12/24 through 2/25. They're just estimates, but have you ever heard of the other two? The relative magnitudes certainly feel more or less reasonable here.- 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...
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.
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
Then you deliver an extended personal attack for some reason. And one that really doesn't seem supported on the merits. Gruber co-created markdown and published a reasonably well received app, Vesper.
I think you're in good faith, and I mean my comment in that spirit. I point out the features of yours to show why the articles may get flagged if they generate comments that go against the spirit of the site.
I think there's a strong case your comment goes against comment guidelines 1, 2, 4, 5, 6 and 7
I glanced at the rest of your comments. None of them are remotely close to this! You're a polite and interesting commentator.
My thesis is that for whatever reason John Gruber manages to draw this style of comment out of people, and that this has increased over time as anti Apple sentiment has grown.
That's not John Gruber's fault and that isn't your fault, it's just the dynamic that emerges.
Comment Guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I'm open to listening to those who oppose the EU's position on Apple's ecosystem. I draw the line at people comparing Apple's circumstances with those portrayed in Harrison Bergeron. Apple, its developer community and its app ecosystem are unlike anyone in that story, and they certainly aren't oppressed rebels. That comparison was an editorial choice made by John Gruber in his coverage of tech news, including a link to a copy of the story he personally typeset. It rang loudly then of sentimental bias, and it's still ringing.
I don't have evidence of the makeup of the Daring Fireball readership, but many of them are at least adjacent to the tech industry, and so his words have incredible reach, Hacker News notwithstanding. But what are his credentials? When he weighs the merits of a programming language, an API, a platform, or anything technical, I want him to speak from experience. Collaborating with Aaron Swartz twenty-one years ago on Markdown is respectfully not very relevant technical experience in the domains DF traditionally covers. Vesper was one ObjC app written by three people in 2013. I'm glad it was well-received, but again, what significance does Gruber's experience have? Why should the industry listen to him when he (admittedly not so often nowadays) discusses software development? If asked, I think he'd strongly agree that people in power should have considerable relevant experience.
PS— the article that began this discussion is, "The Website Hacker News Is Afraid to Discuss". As you can see, I've been eager, not afraid, to discuss the merits of Daring Fireball, though not so eager as to upvote it on HN.
My interest was largely to point out what I saw as the meta trend around discussion of Daring Fireball posts, so I'll leave the debate there or we could be here all night. But I wish you well
If creating Markdown doesn't make you a technologist, what does?
Sure, but he doesn't actually do that very much, does he? Like, that is absolutely not the focus of the blog. He talks a lot about the business of Apple, Apple's products and their direction, and how Apple interacts with various communities.
I don't think someone needs to have an engineering degree to have a valid opinion about the things the EU is telling Apple to do.
It's about Apple. It's an opinion piece, where someone's saying that Apple should do a retrenchment OS release where they just fix bugs. It appears to be written by someone who is some combination of a pastor and a professional opinion-haver ("editor in chief").
I don't think there's any metric by which this person's article should be sitting unflagged at the top of the front page, but Gruber's recent something-rotten-in-Cupertino article should get promptly flagged and hidden away.
Yes, this is the dynamic that emerges. When trust breaks down over silly things like keyboard reliability and right to repair and third-party app stores and $99/year service fees, people that were once rooting for Apple start to question why we hold out hope at all. It's not Gruber's fault for remaining faithful, but many of his modern articles are out-of-touch with the reality of Apple's situation. It's like performative bewilderment at this point, which this OP article really seems to reflect.
Or qiestion moon landing in good faith
Oh, you can definitely disagree. The problem is in good faith which Gruber shows none of. To the point of going from "why the hell would you want to change your Messages default app" to "oh, it absolutely makes sense to chaneg the messages default app but it makes no sense to change Photos, EU is bad" in a blink of an eye.
But I'll bet if he wrote a considered piece on "The Next Generation of Markdown" or something it would do numbers.
I mean, they compared him with Richard M. Stallman, who we know was extraordinarily consequential and influential in technology, but that doesn't mean his takes on oil or judges or whatever matters. I mean, RMS is still plugging away with posts and I've seen zero of them on this site.
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?
Like looking through the recent submissions of DF entries, it's extremely thin gruel -
He thought Bluesky would beat Mastodon, and wants credit for his prediction. Neat, a million people have made this observation.
Apple TV+ is losing money, but Apple thought it would so who cares. Again, utterly irrelevant to this audience.
Siri is bad -- yes, everyone knows. Discussed on here endlessly.
iOS 18 updates re-enables Apple Intelligence -- yeah, we talked about it here a week earlier.
Some executive changes at Apple -- literally just quoting from a Bloomberg article. I mean, this is a pattern across DF where entries are him quoting Fortune or Bloomberg or some tweet and then adding some rejoinder or cheap thoughts.
And it goes on and on. None of this is HN material. It's someone summarizing or giving opinions on actual reporting after the fact. These are basically tweets.
If your content is basically reading tech news and then giving quips or thoughts on some of the news, that sort of stuff just doesn't do well here. And if a minority keep upvoting it, eventually the domain gets down-ranked.
He has had some entries that he put a lot of work and thought into, and they have done well here, even in the past few months. But I assume he looked at the analytics, realized that "blogs" are kind of a fading thing, and decided to try to juice this HN thing as an impression funnel. Which, it should be noted, is pretty funny when you read his posts on Mastodon/Bsky about this, where there his avowed fans saying that HN is just a bunch of poopy head wannabes and it isn't like it used to be, etc. The "it isn't me, it's you" method of self reflection.
“ Does that mean his take on smartphone screen size or Blue Sky vs Threads is anything HN in general needs to hear? Probably not.”
That was actually just over a year ago, and was in response to the US DOJ antitrust investigation (and didn't mention the EU at all). But, perhaps the fact that you remember it as "just the other day" is a hint that my suggesting "Harrison Bergeron" as a metaphor was uncomfortable but apt?
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/03/23/harrison-berger...
I suspect you have many readers like me. I don't mean that we all disagree with you the exact same way— that would be absurd. I mean that we'll read something sincere but misguided, because that's a valuable element of discourse.
Your Harrison Bergeron allusion wasn't apt, it was memorably cringey, a local extremum. It was ridiculous on its face. We can't know what Vonnegut would think of it, but he might have chosen to write you into Cat's Cradle.
Cannot parse. Maybe using the word "shill" is putting too fine a point in it?
A shill promotes something to others partly because that thing's success aligns with their prosperity. That causal chain motivates them to look past the thing's flaws, the people it negatively impacts, and the merits of its alternatives. If we're talking about an org with a stance or policy, the shill is incentivized to align with the org's stance over the stance of its competitors, its customers, and even the org's previous stances, because it's the org in its current incarnation that rewards the shill. However, if the org does something to jeopardize its relation to the shill's prosperity, the shill can criticize the org. Pom poms are optional.
Can someone with intelligence and an open mind be a shill? I emphatically believe so. Well-working minds and hearts can compartmentalize, rationalize and internalize. They can strengthen cognitive dissonance. The incentive to shill can live snugly in that habitat.
Sidenote— In my personal opinion, if there were slightly more or louder John Grubers in the world, there'd be far fewer John Calhouns.
(I'm too dense to understand your last sentence. :-) Sometimes when I take time to cogitate on a thing it will come to me though.)
A shill should levy just enough dissent to retain some credibility among the most credulous. Usually by piling on to obviously losing causes. For instance if someone were an Apple shill, saying that the App Store review process is broken, the royalty split is untenable, XCode is shite and Apple's AI has been pretty bad are all obvious positions to take. These are blatant, undeniable positions.
Someone could have those public positions and still be a shill.
Is Gruber a shill? I mean, he seems entire dependant upon the Apple fanbase[1] for his income, and a lot of his credibility comes from access that Apple directly grants him. They give him products. He gets to host his "Talk Show" live at WWDC. He has done a number of interviews with Apple executives. He seems pretty firmly attached to the Apple teat and they serve up a supply of nutritious milk for him.
The base post was flagged, presumably because it used the shill label, but it's pretty hard to get away from it. And maybe that's perfectly fine, and the industry has a lot of shills for different things and we all factor in where they're coming from. Most HNers expect a "rose coloured glasses about Apple" perspective from Gruber, so it is weighted against the content.
[1] The Apple fanbase are a subset of Apple users. I'm typing this on an M4 Mac. My iPhone and iPad sit beside me. I'm a subscriber to Apple One Premier. Yet I'm not a fan. I don't, for instance, care at all how much profit Apple makes, much less excitedly gloating about what percentage of the market's profit they make. Nor do I get angry that Samsung copied some UI element or phone shape. Those are fan type topics.
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
[^2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3019147
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.
HN's crowd has changed since its inception, but again, not in some really abrupt way.
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.
But I can’t seem to find that comment here on HN that references how Apple articles get downranked.
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...
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 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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=daringfireball.net
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.
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.
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?
Given the amount of stupid things that end up on this site, this is asinine.
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.
Not even remotely true.
Top voted comment is complaining about not being able to run Linux on the iPad: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40207322
Top voted comment is wishing the US would do the same as the EU: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40773883
"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...
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.
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.