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.

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

No argument from me at all.

If one isn't interested one can just move on just as I move on when I see a post about Java or politics.

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.)

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.

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.

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?

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.

This submittal is #1 on the front page with 110 net points. I think the community has spoken.

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.

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.

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?

You do realize that, by definition, "controversial" is a subjective notion, right?

http://blog.yafla.com/A_Curse_of_One_Thousand_Intellectual_V...

The blog post basically bashes NH, then accuses Apple of destroying Microsoft and says that Microsoft should team up with Android.

I've never seem such a huge chip on the shoulder...

(oh how I wish HN had a Meta section)

For the record, I'm all for blacklisting daringfireball.