Revisiting "incorrect predictions" is a great way to learn about the error's in one's thinking and grow as a person. If your way of dealing with incorrect predictions is to pretend they never happened, then that learning can't happen. He doesn't have "meticulous, years-long grudges" against anyone who has made a bad prediction and learned from it. He does do it to people who refuse to admit they've ever made a mistake (eg the Bloomberg guy) or people who purposely make mistakes to pump and dump Apple's stock (Trip Chowdhry). To me that's fair game.
Interesting trends! I wonder what Gruber would say? Certainly the tone around Apple is different these days. One indicative moment was when Hollywood made Tim Cook the villain of Jurassic World Dominion and the reaction was... crickets. Or should I say grasshoppers? Not good, not bad, we just didn't feel anything at all. Now imagine the villain was Elon Musk! That would make people feel something.
It's important to be able to read and understand both sides of an argument. Sadly most people prefer to read media that's slanted in the way they agree with.
As for the EU, the land is devoid of innovation. Whether it's a cure for cancer, AI, a rocket to Mars, or you name it, chances are the next big thing will not be developed there. You can admire them for their socialist healthcare or whatever while still realizing that if the entire world operated like Europe progress would cease and another dark age would start. You don't have to see things in black and white.
As an Apple user, I'm happy with the gatekeeping, it's why I use their products, and frankly I want more of it. If it was up to me I'd like to see them enforcing their human interface guidelines a lot more.
Why can't you just develop for Android or Palm or Windows and be happy while leaving us alone to enjoy what we like? Can you at least appreciate the irony of calling Apple greedy when your main beef is they get in the way of you making money?
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.
(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.
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.
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?
This touches on the actual reason, IMHO. A significant number of HN users is obviously leaning towards supporting the cult, and of course do the part which cult members are supposed to do - scour the internet for inconvenient speech and then downvote, barricade, and whine.
