From first glance there's still some decent traffic on Daring Fireball submissions, even inside the times Gruber asserts deadweighting.
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?
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.
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.
https://daringfireball.net/2025/03/something_is_rotten_in_th...
You're "just asking questions" and inventing percentages. The above example is pretty clear.
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?