Making Our Hearts Sing | Hacker News Reader

Making Our Hearts Sing

daringfireball.net

62 pointschazeon29 comments

Be interested in folks thoughts on the footnote.

I’m assuming he’s wrong about the motive/conspiracy but right that DF links underperform on HN. Why would that be?

> It sounds a bit conspirational, but for many years now it’s seemed clear to me that Hacker News has Daring Fireball in some sort of graylist. It’s not blacklisted, obviously, given the aforementioned two threads about yesterday’s piece, but nothing I write here ever gains any significant traction there. Ever. And the reason there are two threads for yesterday’s piece is that the first one disappeared from the home page soon after it was posted. I think? In this list of recent Hacker News threads for articles from DF, going back four months, only three have more than 10 comments — and two of those are the threads from yesterday. I don’t know who I pissed off there or why, but I’ve never seen an explanation for this.

Currently this submission, after 10 hours, is on position 160, with 37 upvotes and 12 comments.

On position 161, there's an article submitted 13 hours ago with 4 upvotes and 2 comments.

On position 69, there's another article submitted 10 hours ago, with just 11 upvotes and 3 comments.

My hypothesis is that daring fireball articles get flagged, regardless of their content.

Exactly the sort of thing I’ve noticed. Thanks much for quantifying it, though.

That’s weird and freakish. Can someone official confirm or deny?

To some degree I wonder if it’s because the titles don’t always make it clear what it’s about (which is a valid choice). So if you are just scanning the new list you might not realize it’s something interesting or well written. Sort of an SEO type thing.

It’s not clear from the title here if this is even about something tech related at all.

I think the other issue (total guess on my part) is a lot of people hate Apple and enough know Daring Fireball is a “pro-Apple fanboy” site and just reflexively flag it or something.

Edit: I just realized one of the two threads he linked was flagged, so that fits. And while some titles are more abstract (without reading the article first) like this one others are perfectly clearly in the HN wheelhouse.

Probably it is the title that makes these DF articles hard to stand out on HN. DF works better if you read each one of the articles and it is on an RSS reader grouped among Apple/Mac Bloggers.

I just looked and the post from yesterday now says [flagged]. I don't really know what that means in a HN context.

A lot of people see software as a list of features, hardware as a list of specs. But when you think about how much time we spend with these things, maybe they just aren’t that utilitarian. We think of buildings not just as volumes of conditioned air — but also as something architected, as something that can have a profound effect on how you feel, something that can have value in itself (historical buildings and such).

I’ve thought about this a little too. I’m a Windows developer and it’s depressing to think about how many Windows users there are and, aside from games, how few great new user applications come out. The Mac may not be thriving, but that seems to be where interesting new stuff comes out.

I’ve come to believe that raw market size doesn’t matter. For many, computers are about as interesting as dishwashers. What a platform needs are passionate users.

I think money is the big driver. Tapbots is a company that wants to make nice looking software which they sell for money.

On iOS and macOS, this is possible. On Android it’s a lot harder to make money at all, and on Windows the big money is in corporate software where feature spreadsheets trump UX every time.

Obviously there are some nice apps with nice UX on Windows and Android, but devs self sort in a way because it’s no secret that the best place to profit from good UX is iOS.

My experience as someone who used Android, then iPhone for a few years, and am now back to Android, is that the quality of many apps is identical or better on Android, at least for apps that I use every day. There is also F-Droid, where many apps are low quality but I'll have the opportunity to look at the source code, which is usually not the case on the iPhone.

The iPhone apps are all geared toward monetization now. If you want a decent podcast player, you're expected to pay for it, either with dollars or ad eyeballs. Nobody really wants to collaborate on an iOS app. Android has a few options for community-supported players that are quite good.

A lot of iPhone apps want a monthly subscription even if they don't really improve. The ones that ask for one-time payments tend to hide their features in multiple one-time payments. Many smaller apps don't have the residuals that keep their developer interested. They never end in an open source state where someone who cares could take them over, so eventually your investment goes to zero. In this, it's a lot like Windows, except on Windows you can usually rely on backwards compatibility.

Sometimes, using something that has been pushed out the door by a developer who needed to scratch an itch and doesn't care about the aesthetics is preferable to a gorgeous app that lost compatibility at iOS 7, forcing you to buy a different app after an upgrade.

I think, also, the reason why you see this explicit example of the mastodon app being superior, is because the people who care include designers who are willing to donate their time. They themselves use iPhones and don't care about making the Android version because it's not their itch to scratch. That's fine, but it is a contrived example.

Finally, show me the syncthing client that works well on iOS.

> If you want a decent podcast player, you're expected to pay for it

I'm always surprised by how much resistance there is to paying for software around here. This audience, more than most, knows how difficult it is to create really great apps. The idea that somebody (not necessarily you) would look at a high quality piece of software that they will use all the time and think $5 (or even $1) is too much is depressing.

I'm not resistant and I think I explained later on why paying is not sufficient to get what you need. I was saying more that there is not much community around specific iOS apps, and offering a reason why that seems to be true. The ones that do have community tend to be open-source and, of course, virtually identical on iOS and Android (like CarbManager).

What does community mean? Does it mean discord servers, or active GitHub repos, or a mailing list, or lots of discussion on social media? Does it mean groups of friends who share enthusiasm for new apps they find and old apps they swear by? Does it mean indie bloggers and podcasters devoted to surfacing gems?

Show me the meaning of community that doesn't exist around iOS apps, because I see all these things.

Or by "community" do you just mean "open source, developed collaboratively"? Because that's not something I, and likely most iOS users, rank highly in the factors I look for in an app.

Of course it depends on your use case, but in my experience Android apps are much worse than what I can get on iOS.

Here are a couple of examples of iOS which have (as far as I can find) nothing on Android that even comes close:

Infuse (https://firecore.com/infuse) - A really nice video play that handles loads of different backends.

NetNewsWire - It's literally one of the examples from the article, but I like RSS and can't find anything as good as NetNewsWire on Android.

Servercat (https://servercat.app) - Just a nice way to monitor servers and run commands. Great for managing my Raspberry pi and other homebrew stuff

Prologue (https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/prologue/id1459223267) - An audiobook app that uses Plex as its backend.

Elastic Drums (https://apps.apple.com/app/id817419955) - A great iPad / iPhone drum machine that I use all the time for sketching out ideas.

Smart Comic (https://smartcomicreader.com) - An app for reading my DRM free comics that uses ML to zoom to individual panels in a way that is as good as the official Comixology app.

These are just the apps that I use daily and have no Android peers. Not that no Android apps exist to watch Plex, or read comics. On Android the options are just worse. Usually free, but I'd rather pay for a good app than get a crappy one for free.

I've got loads of complaints about Apple software, but 3rd party software on Apple platforms is really good.

Great!

Syncing what? Syncing anything?

SyncThing

I’ve noticed that DF articles rarely appear on HN as well. In addition to the title issue mentioned by others, I wonder if this is because the linked-list posts with his comments (ie most posts) aren’t favored on HN (recommendation is to link to the original article right?).

I do like John, and his podcasts - but every now and then after an extra sappy dose of one eyed Apple BS I need to take a break for a little while. HN audience may have a similar reaction.

This place would be a lot duller if we asked passionate users of technology to stick to the facts.

A life long iOS user using an android would find the experience infuriating at least

Reply on news.ycombinator.com