The Website Hacker News Is Afraid to Discuss

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.

Comment Guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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.

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.

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

>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 qiestion moon landing 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.

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.

He created markdown, does that not tick the programmer / technologist box? Few people will create anything quite as impactful.

> 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?

https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/03/23/harrison-berger...

Correct.

> John Gruber can be thoughtful and form his own opinion while still being an Apple shill.

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

Thanks for the correction! I'd edit my original comment if I could; it certainly makes the point stronger.

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

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

I'd say that knowing and interacting with a lot of active developers probably counts. As far as I can tell, he has those connections.

Yeah, that was where I had a problem — a shill in my mind always toes the line, cannot be objective.

(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 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.

Actually, fun counterpoint. This is the current top of the front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43498984

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.

I don’t understand the criticism - he is a journalist who has released very impactful software in his career.

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?

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.

I took this as he did t have a valid opinion on screen sizes, or one HN would want to read.

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