[bane]

It's better to treat Gruber like a tool and stop giving him attention. Don't submit his posts to HN, don't upvote them, don't discuss them (here I am doing just that so make of that what you will)

In other words, the only reason some people are well known is that they're well known. That kind of fame burns out quickly once people stop paying attention.

don't feed the troll!

[raganwald]

calling the author a troll without addressing his arguments is either plain abuse or ad hominem abuse. Take your pick, either way it isn't contributing to the discussion, is it?

[bane]

Fair enough. I was actually trying to (rather inarticulately I'll admit) pose a more meta-comment that wasn't directed specifically at Gruber, but rather at HN writ large. Stop posting (or at least upvoting) his dreadfully predictable blog posts where we'll spend the next couple days complaining about how he's an overbiased Apple fanboy.

Allow me to elaborate then -- while a rather good writer, Gruber is not interesting because Gruber is predictable:

1) If it's a subject that favors Apple, he'll write about favoring Apple.

2) If it's a subject that doesn't favor Apple, 99% of the time he'll spin it to death such that it favors Apple.

The formula then to a Gruber post is to take recent news, whatever it's about, make Apple looks good by the end of it.

The only time Gruber is interesting is when he actually does criticize Apple -- and Apple virtually has to start a program of using orphans to power their new office building for him to do it.

The meta-comment is that this is all known ahead of time. Yet every time Gruber makes a blog post 2 things happen on HN.

a) It makes the front page

b) Everybody spends 100 or so comments articulating #1 and #2 above. I mean seriously, are there any comment threads here that aren't in some way about this?

Let's look:

The top rated comment (and thread) is: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2891450

The second one is also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2890090

The 4th one is: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2890032

So if the 5th thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2889984

And the 7th: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2890017

And the 8th: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2890071

And the 9th: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2890586

and on and on and on.

Out of 15 threads (and I'm being charitable with what I'm calling a thread, there's really only 4 or 5 with any significant actual discussion) fully 10 of the threads are about #1 and #2 above.

This isn't a signal to noise problem, this is just noise. And worse yet, it's uninteresting noise because this is literally every set of comment threads for every Gruber post.

It's dreadfully dull stuff. So I'm adding my 2 cents into the "let's just stop feeding Gruber by relegating him to not the front page of HN and we don't have to suffer through another front page post with ~70% complaints about his bias" bucket. If people want to read his writing, and know when he posts something new, they can subscribe to his RSS feed.