alt Hacker NewsInteresting 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.
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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.
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...