Comment by benced | Hacker News Reader

Comment by benced | Hacker News Reader

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.

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