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0 pointsJohnBooty0y ago0 comments

     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.

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proline0y ago

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.

JohnBootyOP0y ago

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?

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