Frankly, I find this submission and Gruber's followup insufferable and it makes me want to read him less. I say that as a regular reader of his blog who's purchased several of his t-shirts over the years. But really, these posts alone make me no longer a fan.
And ... while I can understand frustration and disappointment on his end, the long post yesterday, let alone a second post, and apparently now discussion of it on a podcast where he was a guest, is overboard. He often comes across as a touch full of himself, and it's on blatant display here. Don't blame anyone for being turned off.
All I can say is that I found this particular DF post annoying and narcissistic to the extreme. I'm glad it was flagged.
Guarantee you it's more popular than the million "nautil.us" or whatever junk posted here.
If all Dang did was deny, then yeah, it would be quite reasonable to not trust him. But presumably Dang is able to provide a reasonable alternative explanation and has the receipts to back it up.
My guess would be it was algorithmically applied based on past tendency for them to gather early flags or flamewar comments, rather than personal animus. Why there would be a site weight rank is not falsifiable except by the mod team.
But whether there is one seems much clearer. Daring Fireball submissions perform very poorly, the notable one that should have been #1 by any measure was "Something is Rotten in the State of Cupertino".
Might be the most notable Apple article of the decade. That it wasn't number one suggests negative site weight. Which, I'll repeat, is explicitly within the public guidelines for how the site is run. Not a paranoid conspiracy. I doubt the mods would comment on specific site weights as that would open a whole can of worms. Which is frustrating for sites, but I can't think of any social media algo that's public.
What exactly does Gruber think this cabal has against him? He's not that important. The stuff he writes in the grand scheme of things isn't all that interesting. It's a niche within a niche.
There's not really even all that much to comment on about his posts, frankly. They are opinion pieces. Comments on opinions pieces usually take the form of flame wars or are simply too uninteresting to have much to say about. Same for the other bloggers he mentioned who think they are also being downweighted.
I don't agree his "something rotten" post was worthy of #1. After I read it (independently of HN), I sorta nodded along but never thought to submit it here.
There's only 28 comments on it, none very interesting;
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43348891
It only got 176 upvotes. That said, it's clearly lower than other submissions from that day, ending in the 88th position. I can't find any lower ranked submission with even close to that score:
https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2025-03-13&p=3
Also, geez, people sure do spam his posts to this site:
https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=daringfireball.net
So maybe it does get down weighted due to all the repeated submissions.
