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The Website Hacker News Is Afraid to Discuss

(daringfireball.net)
479 points jgruber | 5 comments | 27 Mar 25 00:18 UTC | HN request time: 0.004s | source
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graeme ◴[27 Mar 25 00:53 UTC] No.43489285[source]▶
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).

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rezmason[dead post] ◴[27 Mar 25 02:57 UTC] No.43489970[source]▶
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gehsty ◴[27 Mar 25 12:26 UTC] No.43492860[source]▶
He created markdown, does that not tick the programmer / technologist box? Few people will create anything quite as impactful.
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1. llm_nerd ◴[27 Mar 25 15:55 UTC] No.43494962{3}[source]▶
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.

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2. rezmason ◴[27 Mar 25 16:28 UTC] No.43495267[source]▶
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.
3. gehsty ◴[28 Mar 25 07:36 UTC] No.43502575[source]▶
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?

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4. llm_nerd ◴[28 Mar 25 12:53 UTC] No.43504783[source]▶
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.

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5. gehsty ◴[28 Mar 25 17:46 UTC] No.43508162{3}[source]▶
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.”