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Comment by slg | Hacker News Reader

>The only argument against MKBHD could be the YouTube title he chose.

I clicked through to that Vassallo guy's twitter and that is exactly the argument he is making. He isn't defending the product, which he admitted he has never actually used. He isn't defending the company. He isn't even arguing against a single thing said in the body of the video. He is solely objecting to the title for being "sensationalized" as if it is impossible this product is the worst one MKBHD has ever reviewed. It is fundamentally, to use Vassallo's own words, a "distasteful, almost unethical" argument to make because it is attacking someone's character rather than a product that seemingly everyone agrees is at best half-baked.

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That's a pretty bizarre take on Vassallo's part. I have no idea what kind of ethics he's thinking of. Or whose character is being attacked.

And even wilder to me was this bit: "If a single person can affect the stock price of a company, we usually restrict what they can say or when. MK should be cognizant of the unconstrained power he has (for now)."

That's just wildly untrue. For example, John Carreyrou absolutely destroyed Theranos. Nobody restricts what he says in the sense Vassallo appears to mean here. Indeed, the Wall Street Journal is successful as a business precisely because their journalists see getting the truth to their readers as core to their jobs.

Clickbait titles are part of the medium of YouTube and any regular user will recognize it as such. And frankly, having watched the review, I can easily believe this is literally the worst product he’s ever reviewed; it’s a product that costs as much as a smartphone that does a tiny subset of what any smartphone already does, extremely poorly.

But let’s talk about the clickbait. The full title of the video is, “The Worst Product I Have Ever Reviewed…For Now”. If it was just “The Worst Product I Have Ever Reviewed”, that would be a perfectly fair summary—maybe a little clickbaity, though it doesn’t seem like MKBHD’s style to go on a rant and completely tear a product apart for the amusement of the audience, and that’s not what he does in the video, either. The “…For Now” vaguely implies that maybe, somehow, in the future, it will improve to the point where it is no longer quite so terrible, and there is some sort of hidden nuance to the otherwise strident tone of the first part of the title, that maybe there is some hope of the product one day, in the future, having some redeeming quality perhaps delivered via OTA update. You don’t know! It’s a mystery! And that mystery—the hope that maybe this piece of junk isn’t totally pointless after all—that’s the clickbait. You want to know what he means by “for now”! The most sensational, clickbaity part of the video title isn’t the negative part, but instead the part that implies the product might be of any value!

Ikr? I'm more inclined to agree with this ellipsized note in the fine article:

> Actually, the deference Brownlee gave the vision and the potential of future upgrades was arguably generous

But of course, pointing that out would be a red herring, because I don't believe the original tweet was made in good faith in the first place. Vassallo sounds like the sort who would be satisfied only if nobody is allowed to criticize something he likes (and ideally if at some point you click through and pay money for his… Influencer newsletter? Idfk).

I watched the review and then saw the tweet (or a response to it) later in the day.

The main takeaway I had was "who the hell is this guy telling Marques what he can or cannot think about this product?"

The video was not a bait-and-switch. He was generous with criticism but fair in describing how it was supposed to work and what he wanted from it. So for this random Tweeter to suggest that Marques was being either dishonest in his "unofficial mental ranking (the worst)" or should have been dishonest in minimizing his critique is so patronizing and itself dishonest.

I wasn’t telling Marques anything. I was having a discussion with my audience.

MKBHD has a finite and countable number of reviews. One of them has to be the worst. Even if this wasn't the worst product he ever reviewed, so what? He wasn't saying it's the worst product in the history of products, or that it ran over his dog and spread lies about his sister.

"The worst product I ever reviewed", even for MKBHD, is drawing from a pretty small set. Big deal, Humane. Take your lumps, fix the criticisms, and move on.

It's actually a rather large set. But it's entirely believable that it's the worst product he's reviewed to date.

I think he said this a while back, in one of the smartphone EOY videos, that while he tests a lot of products, he only reviews a few of them.

He also a video about the worst car he reviewed recently, which somehow didn't get the same negative feedback.

Sorry but that’s bs. The title of the video is “The worst product I’ve ever reviewed… for now”.

That is not a personal attack on someone’s character. And it leaves the door open for the product to improve in the future, which he also suggests in the video.

The worst you can say is that it’s clickbait-y but mkbhd doesn’t usually use such extreme titles.

I think you misread. slg was saying that that the Twitter user was attacking MKBHD's character, not that MKBHD was somehow attacking the product's character.

Is that true? From the parent comment: “it is attacking someone's character rather than a product”.

The twitter guy is saying mkbhd is attacking the creator of the product’s character.

You have the wrong read of what I said. To summarize the situation:

MKBHD: This is "The Worst Product I Have Ever Reviewed…For Now".

Vassallo: It is "distasteful, almost unethical" to criticize a product like that.

Me: No, the way Vassallo challenged MKBHD's character is "distasteful, almost unethical".

Yeah, that's what I personally got on my second reading of your comment. Though I did skim the first time.

The transition from explaining Vassallo's argument to explaining the problem with Vassallo's argument is a bit abrupt. It's not immediately clear whether you're referring to Vassallo or MKBHD at that point.

I think maybe a line break around "It is fundamentally", or switching the pronoun to a proper noun, might help it parse better. Overall I liked the way you worded it.

Vassallo: It’s distasteful (and maybe unethical) to use a sensational title like that when you know millions of people will only see the headline and never watch the full review.

You mean just like you just did with YC?

It would be if I said YC is the worst thing you could do with your life.

If MKBHD’s title was Why you shouldn’t buy the pin, it would have been better.

But I accept this interpretation is subjective. That’s why I said “I find that…”

Finally someone with good reading comprehension. Thank you.

Maybe check your own reading comprehension levels. I was criticizing you.

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