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.
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.