The Website That Hacker News Is Afraid to Discuss (You’re Reading It)

Wednesday, 26 March 2025

Back in 2017, the iPhone X was announced alongside the iPhones 8 and 8 Plus in mid-September. The iPhones 8 shipped that month, and I published a review of the iPhones 8 on September 19. The iPhone X, though, wasn’t available to order until October 27, and didn’t start shipping to customers until November 3. It was an unusual iPhone release cycle that year, to say the least. Initial reviews of the much-anticipated iPhone X appeared on October 31, but I’d only had the phone for 24 hours when the embargo dropped, so I published some initial impressions then, but wound up not publishing my full review of the iPhone X until December 26.

A few days later I wrote a follow-up regarding a specific new interaction design, “Pressing the Side Button to Confirm Payments on iPhone X”, which I began thus:

Occasionally I notice a burst of traffic to Daring Fireball from Hacker News. It’s always short-lived, because for reasons I’ve never seen explained, Daring Fireball articles always get blacklisted from Hacker News once they hit their front page. It’s apparent that a lot of HN readers do not like my work on the basis that they see me as a shameless Apple shill, but it’s a shame the articles get deleted because I like reading the comments. I feel like it keeps me on my toes to read the comments from people who don’t like Daring Fireball.

Even after being blacklisted from the Hacker News homepage, though, the comment threads still exist. I went through the Hacker News comments on my iPhone X review today, and a few comments about how Apple Pay works on the iPhone X caught my attention.

What I didn’t mention then was that DF’s buried status at HN was, at the time, a relatively new phenomenon. Hacker News started in early 2007 and for a yearslong stretch, Daring Fireball articles seemed more or less appropriately popular there. Articles that I would think would resonate with the HN readership would hit, and get what always seemed to me an appropriate number of comments. At some point in the mid-2010s though, it seemed like DF articles would get downvoted or flagged after hitting the HN front page. I’d been noticing this for some time when I wrote the above in December 2017.

But even in 2017, DF articles would get active comment threads on HN occasionally. The Hacker News thread I referenced above, regarding my iPhone X review, garnered 107 comments. In the years after that, DF articles went from being mysteriously disappeared after hitting the HN front page (and gaining some comment traction) to pretty much never hitting the HN front page (and thus never gaining any comment traction). I found this curious, and I couldn’t figure out why or how this was happening — or who was doing it — but I didn’t mention it much.

Two years ago, I did mention it again in a footnote, in a piece about the inexplicably poor state of Android apps from a design perspective:

It sounds a bit conspiratorial, but for several years now it’s seemed clear to me that Hacker News has Daring Fireball in some sort of graylist. It’s not blacklisted, obviously, given the aforementioned two threads about yesterday’s piece, but nothing I write here ever gains any significant traction there. Ever. And the reason there are two threads for yesterday’s piece is that the first one disappeared from the home page soon after it was posted. I think? In this list of recent Hacker News threads for articles from DF, going back four months, only three have more than 10 comments — and two of those are the threads from yesterday. I don’t know who I pissed off there or why, but I’ve never seen an explanation for this. UPDATE: HN commenter Michiel de Mare has quantified the apparent suppression, based on the ranking of this very article. Exactly what I’ve noticed for years.

You can see this yourself right now, with the current list of recent DF articles submitted to Hacker News. Most of them have 0, 1, or 2 comments. Some got up to 3. “Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino” is the most read, most commented upon thing I’ve written in a while. On Hacker News it got just 28 comments before being shitlisted, which, I have to say, is just weird. That’s one piece I’d have thought would resonate with the HN audience, and make for good grist for discussion. Then, after the original thread was shitlisted, someone re-submitted it (perhaps confused that it wasn’t on the HN front page). That re-submission got 1 comment before it too fell to the mysterious shitlist reaper.

The one recent exception is “Why Can’t We Screenshot Frames From DRM-Protected Video on Apple Devices?”, which somehow escaped the shitlist and garnered 208 comments. These occasional exceptions to DF’s general shitlisting at HN have always made the whole thing more mysterious to me. There’s clearly no programmatic blacklisting that keeps Daring Fireball articles from being submitted, or from gaining a few comments. But once any traction occurs, something happens and poof, they’re gone from the Hacker News front page. It certainly doesn’t make any sense to me why my off-hand post griping about our inability to screenshot DRM video frames would be an order of magnitude more popular than “Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino” was.

Today, though, I saw a helpful mention on Mastodon that pointed me to an interesting project. An author named Michael Lynch has written a tool to quantify “the highest-ranking personal blogs of Hacker News” since HN’s inception in 2007. According to Lynch’s all-time listing, Daring Fireball ranks #5, which I have to say surprised me, given its years of inexplicable (or at the very least, unexplained) shitlisting status. But Lynch’s tool lets you select date ranges. If you look at 2007 through 2021, Daring Fireball ranked #3, behind only Paul Graham’s renowned eponymous blog and Brian Krebs’s excellent (and also eponymous) Krebs on Security. From 2007 though 2013, DF ranked #2, behind only Graham (who created Hacker News). But if you look at the last four years, from 2021 through 2025, Daring Fireball ranks #72.

Maybe I’ve lost my fastball, and I just don’t write so good no more. Or maybe it’s not me, but the Hacker News audience that has changed in recent years.¹ But it seems to me there’s something fishy going on. What bothers me isn’t so much that Daring Fireball is shitlisted at Hacker News — even though I really did enjoy reading the commentary on my posts back when they regularly surfaced there, and still do when one slips through the cracks. What bothers me is that it’s unexplained. Which, ultimately, seems not so much censorial as just cowardly.