The fascinating thing is, you can't stop the ads on HN from the big big players, because it's effectively accounted as being real news. Zuckerberg held the second public Q&A session the other day, that promised him some news. Then there was that article about a woman engineer at Facebook, the story appeals very appropriately to current events and the emotional zeitgeist of the tech industry, and there was that whole campaign by Sheryl Sandberg in the last few years (which she has dialed down now). So, astroturfing is an amateur's game, the big boys actually launch massive campaigns that give them a nice PR image, they do big actions that ensure coverage. All of this is done very carefully to ensure that the news is framed in a way they want to consumers. One of my favorite pg essays is about this, about the fact that a lot of journalists are lazy and fishing for a marketable story. Make the work easy for them, give them a marketable narrative (communicate it to them not by giving them money/bribing them -- no, that's an amateur's game, you give them the narrative in a socratic manner, you give them selected bits and pieces and trust they'll fill in the blanks). But money/bribing/soft extortion helps too. E.g., if you slam Apple, you don't get invited to their conferences and such. And everyone wants Apple stories... and if you can't report Apple stories, you lose viewers. So you just keep giving out nice Apple stories and you can remain confident you'll continue to get a nice stream of goodies from Apple. Etc. etc.
There's great chapter in Edward Bernays' Propaganda where he takes apart a stereotypical set of newspaper stories and categorises them according to the type of agenda they serve; surpirise surprise almost none are real news (if that's actually a thing? Depends how reductionist you want to go). Applies just as much now as then, and as much to HN as any other media outlet
Now companies and big governments are analyzing network graphs in real time thanks to Facebook. They can test people's reaction on real time to anything.
I don't believe that Apple's success is just about Advertisement, I use their products a lot because they are very good products.
When I was a kid I did not have money so I bought all computer gear myself looking for the best deal, then I also used my own OS(gentoo with everything super optimized). I used to joke with my friends about how Apple was all about Advertisements and nothing about quality, and people was so stupid.
Then I grow up, I started working on my own and I suffered so much for my conscienceless. First I had to change to a stable Debian because gentoo was killing me, then I had to change to standardized hardware too as it was doing my life miserable.
One day I bought a mac as a luxury because I had made some money with my company. I started using it a lot, it was so simple and it did not made me spent as much time as Linux. I made some numbers and it made sense to buy more Apple gear. It worked great.
I made tons of money buying "expensive"() stuff.
What makes Apple great is that is is one of the only companies that get how real people work, read this book:
Now, I am not a fanatic of Apple, I would love other companies doing the same(like doing my computers on metal) but it is not easy. In my experience companies without engineers on place do not know how to create things. Those that have engineers on place do not understand humans well enough.
()expensive is losing a customer because you could not fix something on time. Expensive is paying an engineer to pay for something that should not be broken in the fist time.
It sure looks like it to me. Notice how the flow of his conversation goes from on topic to something completely non-relevant that hits close to home on HN and is quite relevant/important to the members here.
The reply to that comment could be or is an example of how forum-sliding can be obtained with multiple accounts.
How do we know that those up votes are legitimate too?
I too used to use Gentoo, though it was far from my first Linux OS, and Linux was not my first Unix-like OS. I'll spare you the recounting of my entire computer-use history, except to say that I've used a wide variety of operating system over a period of decades, both as a user, sysadmin, and a developer.
I've hated Windows since it was invented, and hated Microsoft before even then, back in the DOS days, when it was a grabage OS that undeservedly dominated the 8-bit market. In some ways it's gotten better (particularly on the stability front), but in others its gotten worse (its dominance on the desktop market is complete).
Apple is like Microsoft with a smile on its face. Everybody's switching to it because it's cool, sleek, and trendy and even Linux is trying to emulate it. But its walled gardens, dumbed down, crippled and bastardized OS'es and "fuck you", "my way or the highway" attitude towards technical users, developers, and sysadmins make me want to puke.
Most users don't know any better, but I really don't get all the technical people who've switched to it from Linux and still sing its praises. They should know better. The most common attitude I hear from them is that they'd rather their OS "just work", and that they're too busy to spend a lot of time tweaking or making it work.
To that I say that they're really not as technical as they think. Someone who loves technology would pick the technically superior solution, the solution that gave them more choice and power, even if it required more of them as users, rather than picking the dumbed-down, technically crippled solution that may be easier to use by non-technical users (or users who don't care about technoogy, or are too busy to care). They would pick the three-button mouse over the one-button mouse.
Some examples of crippled and dumbed-down aspects of OS X off the top of my head (I should really keep a list, as I run in to something nearly every day):
- massive and pervasive lack of choice
- no focuse-follows mouse
- no tiling window managers
- X is not integrated with OS X's crappy windowing system,
so you can't use X and still effectively interact with non-X gui apps
- the Finder is a horrendous piece of shit
- mouse-centric interface, forcing clicking through everything to
configure the machine
- no standard package manager (no, homebrew/macports, etc are not a
good substitute until they can install everything and do it
without conflict with the rest of the OS
- no standard way to uninstall software
- no more server-level hardware, forcing the use of Mac minis in
racks because of:
- license limits to running OSX only on Apple hardware, so you can't
run it on standard server-level intel/amd hardware
- tons of closed, proprietary, non-standard garbage like mDNSResponder, mds, etc
- a feeble culture of open-source compared to Linux/BSD
- default installs stuck with ancient versions of *nix utilities like bash
- etc, etc, etc
- and don't even get me started on the Apple Store or iDevices
I wish I never even knew any of the above, but I've been forced to find out because I'm forced to use OS X at work. I've long suspected that OS X is garbage, but now I know first-hand. It's like Windows all over again.
I guess I should be grateful that it's a *nix underneath, even if it is crippled and bastardized. But the world would be far better off if Microsoft and Apple never existed.
As a counter to the notion that "they're really not as technical as they think," I'd argue that the professional user has to pick and choose his battles. Spending half a day futzing with window manager and X server configurations--whether due to new hardware, an incompatible patch, or something else--really, really hurts when it stands in the way of programming.
I'm using Linux at work (or school -- PhD student here) and having only a non-root user account is a big pain for me. Package managers are unavailable, direct hardware access as well (I can't update my keyboard's programming, for instance), the software is old (debian stable) and you have to clash either with the administrators or have a shadow copy of each application you want to have up to date (emacs, Mono, and others).
Having root on my computer would solve a lot of those things (but the administrators are strongly against that). Still, I write this to stress that no OS is perfectly ready for power users (without root).
