that blog post isn't really convincing.

> Occasionally I notice a burst of traffic to Daring Fireball from Hacker News. It’s always short-lived, because for reasons I’ve never seen explained, Daring Fireball articles always get blacklisted from Hacker News once they hit their front page

It seems to me that he concludes that he's blacklisted because the traffic coming from Hacker News is short-lived?

> Daring Fireball articles seemed more or less appropriately popular there. Articles that I would think would resonate with the HN readership would hit, and get what always seemed to me an appropriate number of comments.

So this guy seems to think that he can predict what will be popular and what will not? I think he's burying the lede here, who cares about being blacklisted, this guy can tell the future !

Isn't it much more likely that his posts are just less popular, and drive less engagement than he hopes? Most people (even very smart people) are bad at meta-cognition, and are likely to fall in the trap of reasoning based on (hidden) assumptions.

If this guy actually has evidence of being blacklisted/botted I would be open to see it, but lack of engament isn't that.