The Website Hacker News Is Afraid to Discuss

Have you looked into the linked article? That's not what gruber is questioning.

1. Obviously, a political article on DF is a poor fit

2. But DF's non-political articles are also seemingly pooplisted, even ones that are clearly relevant to HN's audience

3. There have been quite a few political articles from other sites that have gotten traction on DF without being pooplisted

yeah I dunno it doesn't add up to me. i'm not saying it's a conspiracy or anything. perhaps it is just users flagging his articles and not some concerted moderator action.

My question was, has Gruber written enough non-political articles to know? Like if the number of high quality, original (many DF posts are just links to content elsewhere), about tech articles is down 90%, then of course his article performance here will be down 90%. And that's before considering that Apple itself may have become less interesting and his writing skills may have slipped (reading too much politics on social media rots the brain, Google Elon Musk to find out more).

     My question was, has Gruber written enough non-political articles to know?

It's easy to answer, right? I scrolled down the front page starting at today while watching some opening day baseball. I generally like DF so I was curious if I was just being biased.

I counted:

- 25 articles squarely about tech

- 7 about politics, though it should be noted that I counted articles about the Signal leak in this category even though they certainly do involve technology

- 6 that I considered "in the middle"; mostly about Apple's technical choices w.r.t. navigating EU legislation

- 3 "meta" articles about DF sponsorships, podcast links, etc

So yeah, nowhere near "90% less tech articles." Discarding the latter two categories it's 78% tech coverage. And it's not like he was ever 100% tech coverage. It's clearly not sufficient to explain his stuff getting insta-shitcanned off off of HN's front page, and he was getting shitcanned before Trump was elected in 2016 and he ramped up the politics.

In Jan 2025 his archive has 13 articles. 5 were about Trump. One about Pebble was more link than original content. His archive for Jan 2014, Jan 2015, and Jan 2016 is 100% tech. Going from 100% quality content to 54% is a big drop. I'm sure you could get different results focusing on different time periods, but there's a clear shift away from Apple.

So here's a question- if John himself is a lot less interested in Apple, and now prefers to discuss Trump or sports, perhaps Apple is a lot less interesting? I still follow it closely, but I no longer try to discuss WWDC or the September events with people I know because generally there's nothing that affects them. Their Apple devices work fine and the improvements aren't big enough to discuss with non-enthusiats. Apple is still a great company, but like IBM and Microsoft before, Apple is no longer the center of innovation.

This was an outstanding article and its time on the front page was limited:

https://daringfireball.net/2025/03/something_is_rotten_in_th...

You're "just asking questions" and inventing percentages. The above example is pretty clear.

Per the article, DF started getting (seemingly) disappeared from HN over a decade ago.

Before the years in which you cited his posts were still 100% tech.

So, to recap: your hypothesis is that a perceived shift in focus in January 2025 retroactively affected his placement on HN in previous decades? Does this involve time travel?

You have to also consider a shift in reader affinity, which is impossible to measure

I bet his overall blog traffic has dipped

(Just to be clear, I'm only interested in this from a perspective of understanding HN, which is a de facto barometer of "which way the wind is blowing" in tech and has a looooot of influence in our industry. If HN moderators are steering that influence far more than is previously known, that's huge.)

That really does not follow, for a couple of reasons.

One:

As Gruber freely admits, maybe his writing just sucks now or HN's interests have shifted away from DF.

This is entirely plausible but if this is the case we'd expect a more gradual decrease of DF engagement on HN and not an abrupt and near-total cessation.

Two:

I do not think that the popularity of "organic" traffic to a website correlates strongly with the engagement on HN. Glance at the HN home page, and what do you see? The overwhelming majority of links are to domains that get an order of magnitude less traffic than DF. The current top two:

    - Getting hit by lightning is good for some tropical trees (caryinstitute.org) (98 points)
    - Architecture Patterns with Python (cosmicpython.com) (369 points)

Here's Similarweb's estimates for traffic to the following domains from 12/24 through 2/25.

    - Daringfireball.net: 1M
    - CosmicPython.com: 72K
    - Caryinstitute.org: 92K

They're just estimates, but have you ever heard of the other two? The relative magnitudes certainly feel more or less reasonable here.

No, but it did seemingly peak a decade or so ago and stay there.