Integrity and bullies with blogs | Hacker News Reader

Integrity and bullies with blogs

joshuatopolsky.com

85 pointskacy38 comments

I feel like this is an argument that is being irresponsibly being held in public:

1) Do Gruber or Marco honestly believe that The Verge's ethics are questionable? Both have appeared on On The Verge and frequently link to The Verge... I really doubt they've suddenly developed serious misgivings about The Verge's standards of ethics. And if they have, sniping about it in links and Twitter comments is immature at best.

2) Does Topolsky need to defend the ethics of The Verge in light of such sniping? If so, I feel like a personal, emotional and vitriolic response isn't the way to go. Double down with an editorial piece that restates the ethical stance and integrity of The Verge or ignore the sniping. All this does is bring Topolsky down to Marco and Gruber's level.

Either someone has serious ethical misgivings or nobody does. If there's a serious beef here, I feel like full-on articles and some investigative journalism (2 of the 3 parties are journalists and Marco plays one on the internet) is in order. If not, all three need to grow the fuck up and start behaving like professionals.

update: added formatting

Basically, The Verge is being accused of not being sufficiently pro-Apple in its coverage. It's like people who sit around watching mainstream media all day and scream at their TVs "But, but but, you forgot to mention there are 5 scientists who disagree about global warming!" in every story on the environment.

It would be an interesting experiment if every story about an Apple launch contained references about prior devices that did a feature first.

I work in and around politics, and in our business we have a term (lifted from the sports world) for this sort of behavior. It's called "working the refs."

An example: American politicians from the right are constantly complaining about the media being biased in favor of the left. Why? Because the calculus of whether or not to make such a complaint is pretty simple: complaining costs nothing if you're wrong, and if you're right you cause PR problems for the publication you're criticizing. So you make the complaint whenever you have even the slightest reason to do so.

Each complaint forces the publication to respond. (If they don't, you just scream louder about how they're so biased they won't even hear you out.) And each response creates tedious work, going back through old stories and checking them with a fine tooth comb for any hint of bias. This establishes a classic conditioning (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_conditioning) cause-and-effect relationship: writing a story that the complainer won't like results in extra, redundant work.

Eventually the reporters -- the refs in the game of politics -- pick up (consciously or unconsciously) on the connection between the stimulus and the response, and start gravitating towards the less painful option: framing their coverage in ways that the complaining politician likes. Those stories yield no loud complaints, which means no need to go back and constantly defend yourself. So your reporting gets compromised without you even realizing it.

Marco and Gruber are working the refs here. If you're an Apple fan, it's in your interest for every review of every product even remotely similar to an Apple product to mention that, since doing so both positions the reviewed product as a cheap knock-off and reminds the reader that Apple exists and sells the "real deal." So they've picked this particular review and raised a stink about it. And it's already worked, because Topolsky felt the need to stop whatever other thing he was doing and write a response.

But that's not the real goal of the working-the-refs strategy. The goal is that next time a review of an Apple-ish product crosses Topolsky's desk, he'll ask himself: does this review sufficiently do justice to Apple's competing product? And if it doesn't, is it easier to go through another big public fight defending the story, or to just kick it back to the writer with an editor's note to add a sentence mentioning Apple's offering?

Now go through that thought process enough times and the writers (who don't want to be constantly rewriting their stuff) get the message and just start inserting the sentence on their own. Mission accomplished: the refs have been worked.

Agree 100% about writers following editorial lead.

Copy and publication editors always prefer anodyne comments in my experience. Almost every time I stated a strong or very strong opinion, I was encourage to moderate my tone. Regardless of how strong the evidence was to back up my statements.

Not quite sure that Arment/Gruber are "working" the refs as much as feeling like they need to continually remind people of how things used to be. Apple users (I'm one) have a lingering sense that things might revert to how Apple was during the Dark Times when Jobs wasn't around.

Gruber's tone and attitude are definitely heavily informed by the experience of the "beleaguered" era. (For those who don't know, this adjective was seemingly tossed in front of the company name almost any time Apple was discussed in the press, enough for the word itself to become a joke about perceived anti-Apple bias in the media.)

A lot of Apple fans are still playing a game where they're rooting for the underdog against a world that doesn't appreciate good UIs, well-built computers, or value over cheapness. The situation used to be clear: Microsoft, and to a lesser extent Intel, were the forces of darkness, building a huge market share by saddling the world with cheap crap, while Apple struggles on making something better. Now that narrative doesn't work anymore, but you can see people like Gruber search for new oppressive enemies to try to carry on with the same story. RIM, Google, Samsung, and even Microsoft's phone and tablet division get slotted into the same old story.

Personally, I think you're right that things might revert to how they were during the Dark Times, but that Apple is by far the most likely candidate for the oppressive and massively successful company, and cheerleaders like these guys are helping that process along.

Im glad Josh responded to those accusations. When I read the news on The Verge. I do not really have to worry about how biased it is. Which is a welcome change. I can read some quick facts about what is happening and move on.

I will say, I liked it better when they did more robust stories. It seems they are trying to cover news more like a newspaper. At the beginning it felt more like a magazine.

Am I the only person who doesn't give the slightest fuck whether a product looks a bit like another one?

The iphone looks like a rectangular case with a screen attached to one face, my android phone also looks like a rectangular case with a screen attached one face.

This isn't exactly the Sistine chapel.

I'd have to agree with Gruber on this one. The forums on the verge have some very anti-Apple group which complain about anything Apple. One of the features that they have on the Verge is where their writers show what is in their bags and 9/10 of the time, its a Mac laptop and iPhone. That really gets the anti-Apple folks in a tizzy for sure. Unrelated, this seems like a weird article to be discussing on Hacker News.

So every product review should have a section discussing where the various design elements of the product may have been inspired, even though such a section would be nothing but a waste of space for 99.9% of the review's readers, who probably just want to use the review to decide whether or not the product is worth buying?

When it's this blatant, yes. It's not that the Verge are being pro-Apple or anti-HP or whatever, there is a massive elephant in the room that has been seemingly deliberately ignored that warrants at least a passing comment.

Why does a review, whose nominal purpose is to give the reader enough information about the product to make an informed purchasing decision, need to mention this sort of thing at all, ever?

Arguable how a device looks is part of that. In this case, there is more than a passing resemblance. Topolsky is defending the integrity of his bloggers, but the integrity is questionable if their reviewing skirts around undeniable facts. Doesn't matter if it's Apple or Fisher-Price!

The Verge is the best tech site out there. This type of "Higher moral ground" trolling from Marco and Gruber is absolutely unacceptable.

Apple has truly become a religion, and one with plenty of zealots.

Why is this? Can you explain it?

Responding to criticism in this fashion is a waste of time. It degenerates quickly into a "Did not!" "Did too!" argument. Better to simply write good articles and leave the critics to their own endeavors.

EDIT: Grammar

It has begun! http://www.marco.org/2012/09/10/bullies-with-blogs

Marco is correct except for at the end where he makes a veiled charge that neither he (nor Gruber) has substantiated.

That response reminds me of his response to the pushback to his Tweetbot review. In both cases, he links to the original as if it is innocuous and needs no explanation, when in fact it is incendiary.

Absolutely. I honestly clicked on his link to the original expecting to read an observation taken completely out of context. I was wrong. It wasn't even a veiled attempt at attacking the Verge's integrity - he outright claimed they were sellouts with dubious ethics.

I'm a big fan of The Verge but this seems melodramatic and a little hollow. The HP machine doesn't just share a few design features with the iMac, it's lifted the design wholesale. Way more than any Samsung phone did w.r.t iPhone. Not mentioning this in the article was weird.

And Joshua is being "bullied"? Really? Sensitive types, these bloggers.

The funny thing is that when Joshua Topolsky made an off-hand joke about Windows being "like poison", he was attacked for being an Apple fanboy. Still is attacked for it to this day.

Marco's claim is absolutely ridiculous. I don't know how anyone but one of the most rabid Apple fanbois could even make such a claim, or expect from them to mention that other products look similar to Apple's products in every story. Should they mention it when they are 100% clones? When it's 90% similar? 70%? 50%? What would make Marco happy? Maybe he'd like to send the same kind of criticism to sites covering new TV's or fridges.

As for Gruber's claim, that might not be 100% false. I've noticed that after being heavily criticized by a minority of their readers who are very active and Microsoft fans, about "being too hard on Microsoft/Nokia", TheVerge usually tries to "make up for it", by compensating with other positives or writing more stories about Microsoft/Nokia/WP. They even seem to have one full time writer that only writes about these sort of stories lately (Tom Warren).

Whether these moves are good or bad, that's for anyone to judge. I just think they are a little too reactionary, and I'm not particularly fond of it. I think they'd be better off if they did what they thought it's best, although listening to some feedback I guess can't hurt.

And all that being said, I think TheVerge is one of the more "objective" and impartial tech news sites around, and I think they generally do their best to keep it that way, which is something I like about them.

Well I mean they're writing more stories about Microsoft/Nokia/WP because the phones were announced and are eventually going to be released soon. And I'm guessing they give one full-time writer one specific topic so they have a writer who actually follows along with what's going on with the subject.

I mean they were one of the bigger news sites to come out and accuse Nokia of doctoring their OIS videos (albeit they also got an exclusive article afterwards showing how well the OIS photos looked compared to other phones). I don't think either Gruber or Marco's accusations hold much weight.

In another life I wrote numerous reviews of hardware and software for national magazines. It's a tough beat; if you don't get gear early, your article is too late and gets lost in the crowd. Articles are planned months in advance, so getting stuff lined up from vendors takes a lot of time, and having a good relationship with both vendors and their PR firms is essential to keeping your editor happy. The workflow just required so much lead time between getting the hardware/software, interviewing interesting people, writing the article, creating images, working with copy editors etc. Time is money, and relevancy is always paramount.

Ethically, things have changed a lot. Apple used to be extremely generous with hardware, but as they became more successful (roughly around 2004-2005) they were much slower in answering requests for editorial "loaners." The print industry changed a bit too, and it was unusual to be allowed to keep review gear. So "freebies" aren't acceptable anymore, nor should they be.

Editorial direction is where things can get crazy. I was writing for one publication, and in a review of SMB firewalls, I was told to include one make that was clearly not up to the standard of the three units in the review. I included an honest evaluation, and discovered that this manufacturer was an advertiser in the publication. Later on, review units were always specified in advance, and the publication quickly became a trade/advertisement journal instead of one with honest, critical reviews.

Online pubs have it worse. Their timeframes are even more compressed, and online readers are more fickle. Having an unbiased site is tough, and recognizing biases (as a pub editor) is harder.

Marco and Gruber are right on the overall message: those HP devices are obvious Apple design copies. For some strange reason theverge and Engadget chose not to mention this fact. As journalists they have to mention that every single time. And for Josh to say he's being bullied or trolled makes no sense. If HP changed their logo to an apple would it be trolling to critize not pointing that out too? On top of that, getting overally defensive isn't a good solution. Gruber and Marco's claims were a little over the top, but everyone knew they weren't being literal. They, just like I, were confused on how respected online tech news orgnizations wouldn't point out the obvious.

The other part of his post I take issue with is Josh's swipe at smaller blogs. As if only massive blogs are worthy of contributing to the conversation in a community.

As journalists they have to mention that every single time.

Why?

Are reviews of the 2012 Honda Accord obligated to mention that the design of the car's steering wheel is copied from Alfred Vacheron's 1894 Panhard (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steering_wheel#History)?

If not, what statute of limitations are you proposing on this mandatory statement?

Obviously the 1894 Panhard will not be mentioned because its design became an industry standard and those cars are not competitors at this point in time. HP and Apple are compeitiors at the moment. Apple's design is not an indusrty standard. HP had millions and millions of design choices but decided to ape Apple. If something's a copycat, journalist should call it every single time because that's the highest standard of journalism. Are you advocating for the lowest standard?

It would be fun to hear those calls from PR people.

Blogs are a PR man's worst nightmare come true.

As useful as these products are, they also suck in so many ways. Such is the nature of most computers. Cheap to manufacture, limited lifetime, and it shows. They are 1/100th as useful as they could be. Damned if we should have to pretend Apple's or anyone's products are just "perfect", and similar products are inferior, cheap knock-offs (the stuff is all the same on the inside! made in the same factories), or that we should have to "upgrade" whenever the manufacturer (or a TV ad, newspaper, magazine or blog) instructs us to do so.

Warn callers from PR firms their conversations will be recorded and then upload some mp3's of the phone calls.

Now that would be integrity.

Honestly, at this point I tend to regard Marco and Gruber as slightly more eloquent versions of Siegler. It's been a very long time since I went out of my way to read anything either had to say.

Marco's original comment that set this off: http://www.marco.org/2012/09/10/elephant

Hacker News seemed to agree at the time: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4500574

So the lack of the mention (especially around the keyboard/trackpad - I remember looking at the pictures myself, somewhat aghast) is actually, you know, notable.

The question is whether honest journalism demands that every product review come with a copied/not copied score card, and I do not believe that it does.

The audiences are very different. A copied/not copied story is really an industry story, for people who want to keep track of the competition and status within the computer product industry. Whereas a review is for people who want to learn more about that particular product--people who might not have much sense of the industry dynamics at all.

In addition, it is Apple themselves, and Steve Jobs in particular, who have repeatedly made the point that the only thing that matters is whether the product is great. If better than the original inspiration, it will win. Apple will keep winning as long as its products are better than HP's.

Though I'm an Apple user myself, the comments from Marco and Gruber and indeed some other Apple users reminds me of Christians in America - heavily imbibed with a misplaced persecution complex.

Thanks for slurring an entire religious group. Does a lot for your argument.

Nice job confirming it.

It's almost like I went out of my way to judicially use the word "some" to ensure that I avoided doing just that.

And what the other guy said.

It's almost like I went out of my way to judicially use the word "some" to ensure that I avoided doing just that.

No. You said "some Apple users" not "some Christians." Definitely came off as gratuitously slamming a random religious group.

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