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Comment by Tyrannosaurs | Hacker News Reader

You really equate continual physical and mental abuse with unfavourable trade practices?

Each to their own I guess.

EDIT: My point is that it's a bad metaphor not because there are no links between the two but, as with most heavily emotive metaphors, it comes with too much baggage which distracts from the intended message.

A metaphor doesn't have to be a perfect match for what it's describing but the broad content and emotional tone should be similar and here I think it's hard to justify that this is the case.

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A metaphor doesn't equate two things - it suggest some congruence among features.

The original [great great grandparent] comparison was not primarily noting the congruence between Apple's behavior and wife beating, but rather the congruence between the praise some people were giving Apple for their change of behavior and praising someone for ceasing to beat their spouse.

Which makes it a bad metaphor, Apple's behavior is not abusive. We may not like it but Apple only wants a cut of the revenue they think they help generate. There is nothing in my developers agreement that will lead me to believe that Apple loves me so much and won't enact restrictions to my activity as an ios developer to increase their own profits. Our only recourse is to stop developing for Apple's app store.

Each case is about an abuse of rights. The scales vary a great deal, but that is common with metaphors, and not to be unexpected.

My point is that it's a bad metaphor because, as with most metaphors which have emotional, criminal or violent connotations, it comes with too much baggage which distracts heavily from the intended message.

The word you are looking for is "negative". Negative connotation.

And yes, that is the point of the metaphor.

No, the word I was looking for is emotive.

I'm happy to accept that negative is reasonable here, I don't accept that emotive in this way this metaphor is, is useful or a good reflection of the situation.

So the following blog posts don't hold any such connotations for you?

https://www.iflowreader.com/Closing.aspx

http://blog.readability.com/2011/02/an-open-letter-to-apple/

And those are just the tip of iceberg. Is killing the dreams of small businesses built on months of blood and sweat and money for no good reason an acceptable practice?

Big bad Apple taking away all the success iflow was about to have in their dreams of being a third middleman of a zero marginal cost egood.

At what point do the people at iflowreader and readability put on their big boy pants and take some responsibility for lack of their dreams coming true?

Frankly no, it's business.

In terms of iflow their level of innovation was minimal and they started their business on a platform that took a cut of music sales and a cut of app sales and were then surprised that Apple wanted a cut of other sales.

Readability I'm very slightly more sad about because their model was slightly more interesting but fundamentally it's business and if you put yourself in a position where you're beholden to someone who has shown themselves to be ruthless then I can't get too worked up about it.

Ah, that must be why people complain about my metaphors all the time. I am pretty good at not paying any attention to the baggage, which makes me judge a metaphor just on its merits, whereas other people complain because, ostensibly, they are offended by that.

I don't have to be offended to think that the emotional baggage associated with a metaphor clouds discussion.

Given that metaphors are about communication, that people complain about them all the time, and that communication is about other people, you might want to accept that they are bad metaphors.

Never! My metaphors are good like other things that are good.

That's a simile, not a metaphor...

A simile is a metaphor.

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