Apple made a business decision, and the development community needs to make theirs.<p>As we have seen, there have been good arguments both for and against. Developers will vote with their feet, and I’m sure Apple thought through that risk. No matter how many posts, upvotes, downvotes, etc. I don’t think Steve Jobs is going to change his mind. I feel we are missing other good submissions with all the focus on things beyond our control and which are becoming philosophical discussions.
This is how a news site like this works. If somethings get popular a lot of people will get interested in the topic and post stories about it. Then more people get interested in the topic and so on. It's also a reflection what other sites write about. I don't think somehow limiting how long a topic can be discussed will be good, as a lot of insightful stories will be posted some time after an event occurred. It will fade naturally with time as it becomes less topical.<p>There's always going to be people that don't find a certain topic interesting, but if something is upvoted it means that other people are. So just read the other stories that you feel interested in and when something you are interested in comes up, others can return the favor.<p>Also, I do think there are some "less than optimal conditions" at HN, especially for new stories. But I don't think something becoming "overly" popular is because of those conditions.
Apple setting a bad precedent with this was my hope. I'm now 50% closer to my eventual wish - Apple exerting too much control and screwing up. The control part is done. The screw up... fingers crossed. That will discourage other companies (at least in this space) from doing it. Developers FTW... I'm hoping.
It's one of the hottest stories we've ever seen on HN and I tend to see 'quantity of stories on X' as one indicator of where X will be going in the near future. Simply scanning through the HN headlines without reading every individual post has value for me.