Personally I like their posts, and it certainly doesn't bother me when they reach the front page of HN. The only thing I'm tired of is all the predictable hate that goes their way. In fact, I find it a little petty and embarrassing for HN.
I think in this case it's simply a mirror of their tactics. If you're deliberately controversial, you'll divide the world into fans and anti-fans, as e.g. politicians do.
I personally don't like their posts on HN, I don't even bother reading them anymore. The first few I read where totally devoid of any kind of useful information for me and for most people that are a little bit technical. For the non-technical posts they are merely interesting like "Look at our desks", I found them to be the equivalent of feminine magazine articles for geeks.
However this is only my opinion, and this is not a popular opinion. If you criticize them, invariably you are going to get downvoted. And if there's hate here, how come there's systematically sitting on the top 5 position every time one of their article shows up?
I have found that the criticisms found here are very polite and constructive. This show nothing but good things about HN if people can civilly disagree on a subject.
There's disagree-ing, and then there's talking in circles. As you point out - if they're being voted up, then surely they have a place. I'm just tired of seeing the "is this relevant" discussion on every single one. I find it no different than having someone go "by a Windows PC" on every Apple post, and vice versa.
I agree hate is a strong word, and I used it only a short-hand description of what I meant. I'm not overly sure which other words would be more accurate.
I get you. But here's the catch, and that's also valid for HN: Is crowd validation always the best measurement of the quality of an article? I agree there are a lot of running in circle conversations on HN. Like "Apache is slow, use Node.js", or its contrary "Node.js is bad, use {insert something else}". On HN there's a great deal of know-it-all attitude and most of the posts could be summarized by "Your choices of X is stupid, I chose Y and it's better, therefore, ' Why X is bad and you should use Y' blog posts ".
Anyway, 37signals could be the Kim Kardashian of Software Engineering, very popular and very successful, lots of people following the Gossip. Popularity does not imply quality, that's why civil disagree-ing is useful, we need safe guardians of the quality, even if they seem obnoxious when they criticize what we like.
PS: 37signals is NOT, in my opinion, the Kim Kardashian of Software Engineering.
I think the "Look at our desks" post is more than interesting. It is very useful to visualize how a XXI century company looks like.
In fact, I am using it next week in a seminar about business models and will compare it to the office in Billy Wilder's "The Apartment".
So maybe not technical, but definitely not "merely interesting"
The amount of exposure they get is extremely out of proportion to what they are and do. They do have it down to a fine art. Even this blog post is designed to get people talking about them - which it's succeeded in doing.
They created ruby on rails, which a few people use, and they make a few webapps. They're not a startup. They give (IMHO) fairly poor startup advice, most of which would only work if you're them.
The 37 signals fanboyism all just gets a little bit too much sometimes. Best to ignore and move on though...
Jumping from "a few" to comparing against C and Java is quite a leap. The simple fact is that Heroku alone had over 60,000 apps 2 years ago, and based on other statistics I think it's safe to say that Rails is a tool used by millions of programmers.
The amount of exposure HNers give them by submitting and upvoting their posts, and then the endless hours HNers spend debating them…
37S doesn't ask to be on the front page of HN. They don't even appear to submit their own posts. Certainly they don't have a secret vote-sharing group, because HN now has features to discount those.
So personally, I find it pretty hilarious that there's so much sturm und drang about what 37s "gets". Everything they "get" from HN, HNers give them, all on their own initiative.
I like their posts too. I really admire the company as well. But can we really say every last one is truly great? I dolled out my fair share of criticism (see a couple of those links in the post) but it wasn't 37Signals I cared about, it was quality control. If you land on the front page then more power to you but when just about every one of your posts lands on that front page in rapid succession it starts to look like quality control has gone out the window. We're they all really just that good or was there some fanboy ism involved for lack of a better word?
