The Website Hacker News Is Afraid to Discuss

I don't see how a blog post complaining about vote counts is any more interesting than a comment complaining about vote counts. But ok, I'll bite. The articles are not ranked well because they're not interesting or useful.

The one DF article I remember seeing recently is "Why Can’t We Screenshot Frames From DRM-Protected Video on Apple Devices?" and it seemed like just a fluffy post without any technical info and without any research, just an excuse to dog on other operating systems.

Why do some setups allow screenshots and some don't? His post starts with "I’m not entirely sure" and doesn't get better from there. You can google "what is widevine" and get better info. In reality, different browsers and different OS's are certified to different Widevine levels, depending on whether the content goes through a sufficiently protected hardware path. But in Gruber's world, "streaming services somehow don’t care about what Windows users do" (spoiler alert, they obviously do), and you can take screenshots on Windows because "Windows uses a less sophisticated imaging pipeline" (naturally, because it wasn't created by the sophisticated Steve Jobs!)

These posts are the tabloids of the tech world, and uninteresting unless you need a source to cite to win an argument about why your favorite computer company is morally superior to all the other computer companies.

How then do you explain DF ranking #3 from 2007-2021, but dropping to #78 from 2021-2025? Are you saying my writing was significantly more interesting and useful for the first 14 years but dropped off a cliff starting in 2021, and the keen HN audience noticed the change immediately?

You're making a perhaps-legitimate case for why DF should never have ranked well at HN. But the data shows that the opposite is true: for 14 years it was very popular here.

I tried a lot of dates and I don't see any step change. I see a gradual decline.

  2006-present: 5th
  2010-present: 7th
  2015-present: 19th
  2020-present: 29th

Who knows why that is. Maybe HN's audience has changed over the decades. Maybe your writing has. Maybe the novelty factor for Apple content is gone. Maybe there's just more competition for the front page now that HN is more mainstream. I just think it's unlikely that PG woke up one day and decided to screw you in particular.

The Simpsons had far too many seasons, but Matt Groening eventually went on to create Futurama. I hope you figure things out.

That “gradual decline” is an artifact of your maths, in which you're gradually changing the weight of recent years.

Consider a sequence with an extreme drop-off: 100, 100, 100, 100, 40. Taking averages of all the numbers, then all but the first, all but the first 2, and so on, yields: 88, 85, 80, 70, 40. That might look like it includes a gradual decline, but clearly there's nothing gradual in the underlying data.