Comment by sxg
4 days ago
Interesting how Stratechery (Ben Thompson) is #15 in the last 5 years but not even top 100 in 2025. Similar with Julia Evans: #5 in the last 5 years but not in the 2025 top 100.
4 days ago
Interesting how Stratechery (Ben Thompson) is #15 in the last 5 years but not even top 100 in 2025. Similar with Julia Evans: #5 in the last 5 years but not in the 2025 top 100.
With Julia Evans, it's mainly due to her blogging less. She only published six blog posts in 2025, but five of them reached the front page.[0] By comparison, in 2020, when she was #11th most popular, she had 17 new blog posts on the front page plus 5 old ones.[1] Her site makes it kind of hard to count her total posts in 2020 by eyeballing it, but it looks like she published about 50+ new posts that year.
[0] https://refactoringenglish.com/tools/hn-popularity/domain/?d...
[1] https://refactoringenglish.com/tools/hn-popularity/domain/?d...
HN is very fickle with blog authors, adopting certain people basically as their own. If the authors participate here it leads to a protective instinct among many.
And I get it. It is a sense of community, belonging, and so on.
But at the same time it's groupism and means that often mediocre, lazy content[^1] has an easy path to the front page, and if you dare counter or question it, the crowd will defensively strike out. It's like sharing the karaoke of a family member and crowing about it.
It's more kuro5hin than Hacker News, and honestly it's something I wish this community didn't do as it often makes the front page more noisy than signal.
[^1]: In no way am I saying all content from those regulars fits that bill, but there are many cases where this stuff is #1 and if it was from any random other blogger it would have rolled off of new without a single upvote.
From the other side, I’ve fairly often written blog posts that I don’t put much effort into and have no intention of reaching the front page of HN, only to see 12 hours later that somebody submitted it and it’s on the front page.
I realize this sounds like a humblebrag but it is not a positive thing for me to have every single thing I write submitted to HN whether it’s relevant to a broad audience or not.
This is somewhat true; I know I'm trained at least a tiny bit to look over at the 'byline' on posts if the title attracts my attention...
But it's also muted a bit by the fact there are no icons, no large flashy attention-grabbing bits, and everyone gets the same muted colors for domain and submitter username.
I like that a lot, and contrast it often, in my mind, with Reddit, which now has user avatars, little flashy icons, an annoying habbit of pushing 'full' posts and ads everywhere...
All 100% true, it is more muted, but another effect that happens is that when a source is a sure thing on HN, it's self-reinforcing. People start watching those sites for new entries and submit them, and HN's automatic behaviour is that if you submit an entry that already exists, it just upvotes the existing entry.
Get dozens of people watching the hot blogs for content, each running to submit it, and in an instant it's to the front page and the reinforcement redoubles.