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by jgruber 454 days ago
How then do you explain DF ranking #3 from 2007-2021, but dropping to #78 from 2021-2025? Are you saying my writing was significantly more interesting and useful for the first 14 years but dropped off a cliff starting in 2021, and the keen HN audience noticed the change immediately?

You're making a perhaps-legitimate case for why DF should never have ranked well at HN. But the data shows that the opposite is true: for 14 years it was very popular here.
2 comments
k_roy 454 days ago
I've enjoyed your work for close to multiple decades, probably fell on it back in 2005 from MacRumors, but much less in recent times. And I don't want to knock anyone's work, but I'll give you my perspective in good faith.

1. Writing about Apple simply isn't interesting anymore. Nor has it been for close to a decade. They lost me around the butterfly keyboard fiasco.

I know this isn't the full body of your work, but it's plenty of it. As a professional in the tech space for over 25 years, I went from being a devout Apple follower (installed the OSX beta on my Tibook back in the day), to basically not caring. They've gone from being innovative and evolving, and the best mix of Unix+GUI, to just being a system I'm forced to use for work. I'd rather use a Thinkpad/XPS/etc with Linux for anything else.

2. Your writing has gotten dramatically more... cynical over the years? Maybe it's just a side effect of growing older, as I know I have too. But it's also why I stopped blogging on my blog, which was popular enough in enough circles.

Like I said, this is just my perspective, so you can call me full of crap or whatever.

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ryandrake 454 days ago
> 1. Writing about Apple simply isn't interesting anymore. Nor has it been for close to a decade. They lost me around the butterfly keyboard fiasco.

I think this might have a lot to do with it. I considered myself a devout Apple fanboy a decade ago, but every software release and new product they've developed has been less and less interesting. It feels like they're abandoning me as a customer as I get older. And every former fanboy has that one "straw broke the camel's back" moment they can point to where they lost the faith. For you it was the terrible keyboards, for many it was the headphone jack. For me, it was a tiny change: They quietly dropped support for 1080i resolution around the time of macOS 10.5 or 11. Suddenly my Mac that ran my home theater could no longer drive my TV, just because Apple decided "fuck this guy, we're not going to support this anymore."

I still have an iPhone 7. No phone released since then have I really cared about enough to bother upgrading. I don't give a shit about emojis and chat stickers and more annoying notifications that butt into my life.

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do_not_redeem 454 days ago
I tried a lot of dates and I don't see any step change. I see a gradual decline.

  2006-present: 5th
  2010-present: 7th
  2015-present: 19th
  2020-present: 29th
Who knows why that is. Maybe HN's audience has changed over the decades. Maybe your writing has. Maybe the novelty factor for Apple content is gone. Maybe there's just more competition for the front page now that HN is more mainstream. I just think it's unlikely that PG woke up one day and decided to screw you in particular.

The Simpsons had far too many seasons, but Matt Groening eventually went on to create Futurama. I hope you figure things out.

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Smylers 454 days ago
That “gradual decline” is an artifact of your maths, in which you're gradually changing the weight of recent years.

Consider a sequence with an extreme drop-off: 100, 100, 100, 100, 40. Taking averages of all the numbers, then all but the first, all but the first 2, and so on, yields: 88, 85, 80, 70, 40. That might look like it includes a gradual decline, but clearly there's nothing gradual in the underlying data.

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do_not_redeem 454 days ago
Right you are, good catch. Here it is broken down by year then.

  year rank
  ---- ----
  2007   80
  2008   13
  2009    3
  2010    1
  2011    2
  2012    9
  2013   78
  2014   14
  2015  305
  2016  363
  2017    7
  2018   65
  2019   28
  2020    7
  2021  106
  2022  353
  2023   86
  2024   82
I still don't see a step change. 2022 was bad, but not as bad as that slump in 2015-2016.
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znpy 454 days ago
> I see a gradual decline

It just seems the guy from DF can't accept that

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