Same. The GPT5 “Robot” persona does what no custom “be terse”, “no fluff”, etc. custom prompt ever could. It actually makes ChatGPT terse and to-the-point and eliminates (or at least greatly reduces) fluff. I love it.
This is fantastic, and I'm embarrassed I didn't think to do this year-by-year analysis myself. But then how do you square up the tepid response here to
My thesis is that HN would like you to think their moderation is highly transparent, and it's very clear that the core HN audience believes that to be true, but that in fact it is not transparent at all.
If the problem is with my writing "being not that interesting or useful and also contentious", how then do you explain Daring Fireball ranking #3 here from 2007-2021 but dropping to #78 from 2021-2025. Do you think my writing was that much more interesting and useful (and less contentious?) for the first 14 years of HN but changed suddenly in 2021?
Or do you think HN's hidden admin moderation changed suddenly around 2021?
> Apple is know for stopping shipping pre-release hardware to people that are honest in their review and that might call out questionable choice.
I've been doing this for a long time and I'm not aware of a single case where this has happened. I'd love to write about this, so please let me know which reviewers, who had previously been seeded with review unit hardware from Apple, were dropped after they wrote honest review. (I don't think what you're describing is, in any way, an accurate description of Apple's relationship with Lewis Hilsenteger.)
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.
How is it hypocritical to hold the view that some places are intended to be open forums for comments from anyone, and others are not?
Also, by not hosting my own comments, all public commentary on my writing is thus out of my control. I don't get to block comments I don't like here, or on Mastodon, or Twitter/X, or Bluesky. I think that's actually for the better.
But the only post on the recent submissions list that is actually marked "[flagged] is this one. If it's because enough high-karma users are clicking "flag", wouldn't they all show up as "flagged"?
> Case in point: just the other day, he equated the EU's rulings about Apple's ecosystem to the dystopian short story Harrison Bergeron. Rah, rah, Goliath! Sis boom bah!
That was actually just over a year ago, and was in response to the US DOJ antitrust investigation (and didn't mention the EU at all). But, perhaps the fact that you remember it as "just the other day" is a hint that my suggesting "Harrison Bergeron" as a metaphor was uncomfortable but apt?