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've enjoyed your work for close to multiple decades, probably fell on it back in 2005 from MacRumors, but much less in recent times. And I don't want to knock anyone's work, but I'll give you my perspective in good faith.

1. Writing about Apple simply isn't interesting anymore. Nor has it been for close to a decade. They lost me around the butterfly keyboard fiasco.

I know this isn't the full body of your work, but it's plenty of it. As a professional in the tech space for over 25 years, I went from being a devout Apple follower (installed the OSX beta on my Tibook back in the day), to basically not caring. They've gone from being innovative and evolving, and the best mix of Unix+GUI, to just being a system I'm forced to use for work. I'd rather use a Thinkpad/XPS/etc with Linux for anything else.

2. Your writing has gotten dramatically more... cynical over the years? Maybe it's just a side effect of growing older, as I know I have too. But it's also why I stopped blogging on my blog, which was popular enough in enough circles.

Like I said, this is just my perspective, so you can call me full of crap or whatever.