I tried to make this point below in a more subtle way, but you take on the issue more directly.
Gruber's arguments never make any sense. Historically, he changes his opinions more or less based on what Apple is currently doing. He adds little value, and it seems clear that he's making a lot of money as a pro-Apple cheerleader from his blog posts. (Which is fine, don't get me wrong, but it doesn't make him a good news source.)
However, I'm not sure how to get rid of Gruber posts. With certain types of posts, HN can feel like an Eternal September.
Certainly the first few times I read a Gruber post, I thought there was some legitimate content there. But now, his posts feel largely like regurgitated commentary on discussions had elsewhere, and his opinions feel utterly discredited by their uniformity.
Without downvotes, and without flags removing Gruber posts, I'm not sure what we can do. Could we possibly, as a community, just agree that a blacklist of Gruber posts is good for us? How would we begin such a discussion?
Nobody said Gruber wasn't biased, but he forms cogent arguments. The same can not be said for Apple's consistent detractors who seem to have a real chip on their shoulder and thus end up grasping at straws.
Granted there is a lot of valid Apple criticism that you won't get from Daring Fireball, but everyone has their viewpoint. Gruber is far from the worst stuff that shows up on HN.
No he doesn't. The majority of his posts are transparent fact twisting and fantastically uninteresting (as are the predictable comment threads surrounding most of his posts). On the rare occasion he's not outright fanboying for Apple, he can be a decent and breezy writer.
Unless he's actually providing some interesting commentary (and yes I do give his posts a read so I don't try and kill something that's genuinely useful) I'm resigned to just flagging his mindlessly biased nonsense.
In other words, I don't flag all of his stuff, but I did flag this.
But we can summarize the vast majority of Grubers posts thusly:
"Something about Apple = Great"
then generate a dozen or so threads of nothing but either fawning praise for Gruber or the same repeated complaints about his bias.
At this point Gruber posts and the follow up "conversation" (I'm using it charitably at this point) are something one could probably machine generate, then randomly insert the entire thing into HN's new queue and it would be virtually indistinguishable from the real thing.
in other words, Gruber fails the Turing test and I for one (among apparently several HNers) are tired of having what are essentially Markov chains jamming up the front page.
The problem is everyone coming out and saying "let's ban Gruber" every time one of his stories are posting. This compels people like me to respond because I think he posts interesting stuff. If it weren't for the knee jerk reaction from the haters then we could have a decent discussion. I certainly wouldn't come in here unilaterally praising Gruber, I would respond to his points just like I do with any other post (except Dvorak, I always propose banning Dvorak because he is actively corrosive to intelligent discourse).
I ask this as an absolutely honest question, when Gruber writes (as he is prone to do) a piece that consists pretty much entirely of Apple praise, what exactly is it about that you find interesting?
I'm not trying to troll, it's clear that there is a minority here, including myself that can't find any possible information in them, but the HN majority clearly find his writing absolutely fascinating and full of all kinds of information nuggets that pass me and others right by.
I always propose banning Dvorak because he is actively corrosive to intelligent discourse
Why can't his articles just be well written opinion pieces? He's making observations and drawing conclusions from them about a company (and their products) that he clearly loves.
If one isn't interested one can just move on just as I move on when I see a post about Java or politics.
I am not sure if this is what you meant, but cogent means convincing.
1. Are you convinced that going forward, Apple's most "sustainable advantage" is economies of scale? Do you believe that consumers primarily buy Apple products based on price?
2. Do you believe that building up economies of scale would take Dell or Samsung a "decade"?
(These are the primary claims in the conclusion of Gruber's essay.)
1. The economies of scale may not translate to lower prices for the consumer. Consider their mobile offerings. Apple has a tiny portion of the handphone market share, but makes huge profits. They appear to get massive economies of scale.
If you sell a handphone cheaper than the iPhone, you make very little profit and if Apple ever feels threatened, they can just slash their own prices and still make more profit than you. Until then they charge what the market will bear and make huge profits that they reinvest into their business increasing their lead.
2. It's possible. In 2009 Apple purchased all of Samsung's NAND. At the time that was apparently over 40% of the world's NAND.
No, it's this kind of comment that start to make HN feel like Eternal September.
Discuss and vote on topics on individual merit is HN, the content-free Gruber/Apple hatefest some people systematically try to engage in every time the author/subject comes up is what devalues HN, not Gruber posts.
“Hey, I have no arguments but this fella obviously makes no sense so let’s just all agree and censor him, pretty please?”
Maybe that is a good idea. Contentless comments that only attack and are always too lazy to actually argue make submissions like these so damn frustrating. If he is so wrong it should be simple to destroy his arguments.
Could we possibly, as a community, just agree that a blacklist of Gruber posts is good for us?
If I am to be considered to be part of that community then no, I can't agree with that. I actually like quite a lot the way he writes even if I don't agree with him most of the time.
In fact, I think the community has already agreed that they like Daring Fireball posts, otherwise it wouldn't be on the front page.
We can agree, though, to spend more time in /newest and complain less about what makes to the front page.
DF is an evangelist for the Apple religion, so he reliably brings out the true believers. This stuff might be entertaining but it's certainly not informative. BTW, this is part of the diabolical genius of Apple - it is not a consumer choice, it is belief system.
You seem to have missed an earlier part of my comment. Because HN requires very high karma thresholds before enabling downvotes, net points are an extremely asymmetric measure.
However, one possible solution would be to enable downvotes, but only on controversial posts such as Gruber's. That would enable both sides of the community to speak.
How would you feel about such a measure?
EDIT: Controversial might be defined objectively as the ratio of upvotes to flags, or similar. People regularly comment on the fact that they have flagged Gruber's posts, but I presume that moderators currently just ignore such flags because the content isn't offensive, against the rules, and so on. For that matter, it would be interesting to know how many flags are currently on this post.
How hard is it for you to not click on something you don't want to read?
I see hundreds of posts here every day that I don't click on, some in the top 5. I don't start campaigns to censor these posts, I assume people upvote them because they find value in them. Obviously people find value in Gruber's posts if they are being upvoted.
So here's the suggestion again: don't click on it bro. Problem solved.
Yeah, but you still wanted to read it badly enough that you came here to comment 3 posts deep.
It's funny how someone can hate a certain type of article so badly that they will read it and comment about how badly they hate it. I mean, why go to all the effort?
I know right? It's like every time I see a post to daringfireball, I open it, hoping for some interesting reading -- Gruber is actually a very capable writer. And on occasion I do find something enlightening. But the rest of the time it's like a Rick Roll...with the HN collective pointing at me going, "HA! Got you!". And I guess that's gotten under my skin after a while since I can't understand why these Gruber posts are tolerated, even encouraged in some cases, while links to cats dancing or actual rick rolls are discouraged.
On Hacker News -- a once great but now decrepit wasteland gathering point -- virtually every post by John Gruber, no matter how unnuanced, uninsightful, and predictable, makes it to the front page. It only needs to speak to that small minority who will predictably and in a concerted fashion vote it up. Any competitor (HN is long past gone. We live in a upside-down world where specialized subreddits on Reddit are insightful and interesting, while HN is populated with superficial talking points, movie references, and pun threads) would be a better site for individuals if they allowed a logged in user to flag stories for noninclusion in any personal vote counts. That if they see yet another empty Gruber post on the front page they could flag it and anyone who voted it up would be removed from any future counts and rankings as presented to them, either on comments or posts
Sites can definitely be blacklisted (Valleywag, for ex). There's nothing in the HN FAQ about how to go about submitting a site for blacklisting though.
For the record, I'm all for blacklisting daringfireball.
Gruber's arguments never make any sense. Historically, he changes his opinions more or less based on what Apple is currently doing. He adds little value, and it seems clear that he's making a lot of money as a pro-Apple cheerleader from his blog posts. (Which is fine, don't get me wrong, but it doesn't make him a good news source.)
However, I'm not sure how to get rid of Gruber posts. With certain types of posts, HN can feel like an Eternal September.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
Certainly the first few times I read a Gruber post, I thought there was some legitimate content there. But now, his posts feel largely like regurgitated commentary on discussions had elsewhere, and his opinions feel utterly discredited by their uniformity.
Without downvotes, and without flags removing Gruber posts, I'm not sure what we can do. Could we possibly, as a community, just agree that a blacklist of Gruber posts is good for us? How would we begin such a discussion?