The Website Hacker News Is Afraid to Discuss

It's well documented that user flags affect the ranking of stories even before stories are marked as [flagged]. While flagging certainly contributes to the lack of discussion on your articles, I believe that the main reason is that, for the most part, the Hacker News audience is less interested in your take than it used to be.

Case in point: In recent months, a lot of recent Trump/Elon posts have been flagged and disappeared from the front page, but still managed to garner hundreds of points and comments. My assumption is that a significant portion of users use hn.algolia.com, circumventing the flagging algorithm. Personally, I've recently found myself using hn.algolia.com (filtering for top stories in the last 24h) more often than news.ycombinator.com.

If your issue was purely flagging-related, your articles should be able to generate engagement. That's why I'm saying I think there is a lack of interest.

Personally, while I appreciate your work, it's become less interesting to me over time. The value of your blog to me is mainly around getting a perspective into how a die-hard Apple fan would think about a certain topic. This was fun in the period from 2007 until some point in the mid-2010s, when smartphones were revolutionary and the iPhone vs. Android ecosystem battle was still relevant. But ever since phones converged into commodities, it just stopped being interesting. No one is emotionally invested in their choice of phone anymore.

Don't take my word for it. Compare the Google Trends for MacRumors [0] and Daring Fireball [1]. Both faced a sharp decline starting in the mid-2010s. It's not a surprise that engagement on Hacker News would mirror those trends.

[0] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...

[1] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...