[great_tankard]

This is exactly how I feel about him too. I also find his "number big" approach to writing ("check out my 18,000 word blog about something I'm learning about in real time") off-putting, so I've completely stopped engaging with it.

We need better critics of the industry.

[cyclonereef]

I always gets the sense around a third of the way through his articles that whoever reads his drafts just gives up. It goes from wordy and repetitive to wordy, repetitive, filled with rage-bait exasperation and more filler than content.

Give the man a 2000 word budget and he could probably write a better article and cover the same information

[chromacity]

> We need better critics of the industry.

There's plenty, but they don't have enough material to post once a week. And if you don't post once a week, you don't end up on HN once a month. As simple as that. Looking at the blogs that show up on HN regularly, the usual hit rate is 10-25%.

[great_tankard]

Yes, but the HN crowd isn't Zitron's main audience. He appeals to smart people who don't understand anything about computing or business. I do not mean this in a disparaging way; it's a curious audience that has somewhat justifiable moral and aesthetic objections to LLMs and especially the companies peddling them.

The problem is that Zitron has charm, an authoritative voice and a very aggressive online presence. That's a difficult combination to compete against.

[JohnMakin]

I started following early 2024, and the scene was much different - he was mostly a lone voice against the insane hype at the time, which definitely was not delivering. I liked hearing that opinion, amongst a wave of bullshit and slop and coming off the blockchain mania was very difficult to stomach.

The landscape has changed a lot, but his content has remained mostly the same, maybe much more aggressive and less curious (in the beginning he would entertain other viewpoints more often), but since the tech itself has changed around him, so his repetive shtick falls a lot more flat than it used to because he is completely unwilling to entertain any other position other than the one that established his blog/show.

[Lerc]

>We need better critics of the industry.

I often wonder if there are people promoting people like Zitron because they want the poor quality criticisms to be prominent enough to be the ones that they face most often. It must be a lot easier than having to address valid criticisms.