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Comment by panic | Hacker News Reader

This chart is hard to read: http://i.imgur.com/HJYmCLN.png

Since the values are percentages, it's weird that the scale is out of 0.9 -- why not 100? Why leave out the other ~98% from the visualization? The radial arrangement makes it even harder to read and compare the values.

The effect (at least for me) was to make it seem like these images appeared much more often than they actually did. I actually found the raw numeric table below more illustrative!

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Yeah, this "radial bar graph" trend is really baffling. I suspect some charting software added it as a new chart type and everyone's trying it out. Hopefully it will die soon.

Pie charts are already a terrible visualization, this is way worse. You're supposed to compare the area of these half circle shaped rotated slices easily? Should have just used a bar chart, in fact why wouldn't you use a bar chart? You could just have a single box and illustrate the percentage amounts by dividing the box up into different colors to indicate the percentages of a whole, but this? Nope. Tufte would probably not be pleased.

Pie charts are excellent for showing parts of a whole, and very poor for any other type of visualization. Just because people are misusing a chart type doesn't make it fundamentally useless, regardless of what Tufte thinks.

At a scale of 100% I feel that 0.84% would be awfully few pixels. That said I agree that a bar chart might have been more appropriate but c'mon - pretty!

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