The Website Hacker News Is Afraid to Discuss

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

Cannot parse. Maybe using the word "shill" is putting too fine a point in it?

If creating Markdown doesn't make you a technologist, what does?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

(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.)

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.

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.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43150182

2: Their exact word

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.

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.

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.

>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 suspect there may be a simpler explanation: 
    a lot of people for some reason really dislike 
    John Gruber and view him as someone who slavishly 
    praises Apple.

HN's crowd has changed since its inception, but again, not in some really abrupt way.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

    He did start to write a lot about US politics, 
    which for me is enough to stop reading his blog.

However, that doesn't adequately explain DF articles' swift removal from HN's front page.

On HN's page front page I'd expect article links to sink or swim based entirely on their own individual merit.

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

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

All I can say is that I found this particular DF post annoying and narcissistic to the extreme. I'm glad it was flagged.

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.

Guarantee you it's more popular than the million "nautil.us" or whatever junk posted here.