The Website Hacker News Is Afraid to Discuss

For posterity, here's a spreadsheet of all Daring Fireball submissions to HN, sorted chronologically: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1A7ljmWbHtFsB4VRJ1Q0d...

From first glance there's still some decent traffic on Daring Fireball submissions, even inside the times Gruber asserts deadweighting.

How then do you explain DF being #3 from 2007-2021 and #72 from 2021-2025? It’s clearly not blacklisted, but clearly is shitlisted, no?

Have you looked into how much of DF was about Apple and how much was about Donald Trump during the affected time periods? It seems that you write about tech a lot less and politics a lot more. Which is fine, it's your blog! But don't expect tech enthusiasts to automatically be interested in your opinion on immigration or whatever.

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).