Haters Gonna Hate: The Argument Against Fanboys | Hacker News Reader

Haters Gonna Hate: The Argument Against Fanboys

blog.travisbloom.me

21 pointsTBloom20 comments

What I don't understand about fanbois is how most of them have no skin in the game. It's OK to argue passionately about the merits of iOS if you designed and implemented it. It's a little weird when all you've done is paid $599 for a phone that uses it.

Define yourself by what you do, not what you've bought.

In what sense does a person who has just paid an engineer $599 for something "have no skin in the game"? Seems to me they have just anted up $599 worth of skin. Indeed, unless they return their new phone within a short period or the thing breaks under warranty, they're holding the bag. If they decide three months later that the phone sucks, it's not the engineer that feels sad. The engineer has made a profit.

There's an old saying about paying, pipers, and tunes that seems appropriate here.

Let's say the average iPhone user makes $100,000 a year. That means the $599 iPhone is about 0.599% of that person's income. If they work 40 hours a week, out of a total of 168 hours in a week, that means they spent 0.143% of their year working to get the phone. But the person who designed the phone spent 100% of their working on the phone.

So the average user spent less time on the phone, and they didn't design the phone, they just gave AT&T a tiny bit of their money once a month.

Your analysis is silly. The iPhone is a status symbol, just like a BMW or Grey Goose. There are going to always be dumbasses identifying personally with these things in a vain search for self-esteem. In reality these people are a tiny minority with an age distribution skewing well under the age of full frontal-lobe development, but they make enough noise in forums that you'd think the fate of the world hinges on this bullshit.

Where you're wrong is in assuming this affliction is only with dumb people or a minority. We're status-seeking creatures, it affects us all. Of course to degrees, but it's not as if educated techies don't get into pointless flame wars all the time.

jrockway: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases

Dumbass doesn't necessarily mean dumb. Lord knows i've participated in my fair share of flame wars, but I've grown more resistant to it as I've aged.

There are factors other than economics involved, such as aesthetics and appreciation of quality.

Should people not care about (random example) the Grand Canyon because they have no "skin in the game" other than the tiny percentage of their tax money that goes to fund the operation of the park? A less-lofty example would be to argue that people shouldn't have a preference between a first-rate restaurant and Burger King, simply because a meal at the restaurant (though expensive) doesn't represent a significant portion of their annual income.

Is it OK to complain about something you didn't make, didn't pay for, and don't use?

Stockholm Syndrome.

Can we purge the word "fanboy" from our collective lexicon?

I don't think I've seen a single discussion enriched by its use. It's just a catch-all insult, like the "fag" of the twenty-first-century tech scene.

(Don't even get me started on "fanboi")

Really? To me it pretty plainly sounds like a term reserved for people who are dogmatic adorers. Zealots if you will. That's a very specific meaning, and not catch-all at all.

Use the term zealot then, or something even milder (like "supporter"). The problem with a term like fanboy in a serious discussion is that it is heavily derogatory, and derogatory terms typically shut down debate.

Typically whenever people start throwing insults around, the debate has already shut down and people are just scoring points from the audience. The use of the zealot/fanboy insult is just to point that out to the audience in case they missed it, since someone can still be completely polite yet still a fanboy unwilling or unable to spout anything but their own set of talking points. So shutting down a discussion isn't necessarily due to the person who cast the first insult, and sometimes there wasn't one to start with.

It's the people who insist on being polite that you have to watch out for; you can be a lot meaner, with polite speech, than with derogatory speech.

It doesn't seem any more negative than 'zealot' to me.

I feel that gadgets can be a proxy for people to feel superior to each other like with cars, sports teams, and purses. I don't know what people hope to get out of arguing about it other than entertainment perhaps.

Skillful marketing encourages people to define themselves by the things they buy. Apple in particular is very good at this.

How does Apple encourage people to define themselves by the things they buy?

The "I'm a Mac" ads are probably the most glaringly obvious case. The iPod dancer ads are another example of marketing that revolves around selling an image and lifestyle. Everybody does this kind of thing, Apple just does it better than most.

The "I'm am Mac, I'm a PC" ads for example try to make people associate the computer you buy with your personality and lifestyle.

In addition to the "I'm a Mac" campaign mentioned by others, a recent example would be the "If you don't have an iPhone..." campaign: http://www.apple.com/iphone/gallery/ads.html

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