Wasn't it accompanied by quite a well-written article? That's what I'm reading on the forums:
"It was a huge article. For quite a while, iPhone 4 was ahead. I did a few page refreshes and EVO 4G was starting to catch up really fast. Next time I refreshed, the article disappeared without a trace....down the memory hole, like it never existed...many hundreds of comments in a couple of hours."
Maybe so, but as your parent post says who genuinely cares? That article and poll outcome are not going to be some holy grail that changes any consumer's mind about what to buy, the bias of the employee in the shop that 90% of people who want a phone go to for advice are far more effective.
The other 10% are the ones reading a tech journal online and already have a fixed opinion on what they would get, so the playground analogy of "I want my favourite to win" is very well fitting to this situation.
Let's also not kid ourselves that there was some genuine gold or masterpiece of literature in the comments either (more likely some variant on the laughably naive "when will the world wake up and realise that they DON'T WANT A CLOSED PHONE OS"); the entire world would be better off if stuff like this wasn't even given the oxygen of publicity.
Even if a given online poll is never actually fixed in practice, they're still seriously bad quantitative measurement if they use a self-selected sample of people.
You're not even able to say that n% of Engadget readers felt some way, because the population of people who happen to show up while the survey is open is still not randomly selected within that demographic: what day of the week did you post it? Did someone with an axe to grind promote the blog post for you on another site, on facebook, or some IRC channel...on Colbert?
Respondents have to be randomly selected, and this is widely known. But since polls generate traffic and engage the readership everybody looks the other way. Even on esteemed sites like HN where everybody should know better - although I have faith that it's not done here for the purpose of generating traffic.
I'm an old fart, and "journalism" is an accolade that I would never bestow upon a techno-lust blog. Still, this event is dubious.
But it's not like the poll was actual quantitative measurement, so the world didn't lose anything of value beyond whatever dubious value it had to fanbois and rabid detractors alike.
Although it would have been best if Topolsky et al. had figured this out before they posted the poll, the reason for pulling it is quite sensible. Comparing a device that has sold not that many units yet with a device that is yet to go on sale, serves no purpose at all, except for providing a tribune for "fanboy" circle-jerking.
So, you write and publish an article comparing two phones under non-ideal circumstances, let it air a couple hours, attract attention and then pull it - along with comments and a poll - because it was a comparison done under non-ideal circumstances that should be redone later?
Write a second article apologizing for the first one. Don't make the first article disappear.
I think what happened here is the poll was posted before being approved by someone slightly higher up the totem pole at Engadget and was retracted by said person so that a more full treatment could be done later.
People make mistakes, this doesn't really bother me too much, especially since they have apologized and promised a more in-depth re-post in the future.
What does bother me is how crazy people are getting about this. I understand being a fan of something, but there's such a thing as taking it too far. Yeesh.
When you publish news for public consumption, you have to be held to higher standards. Engadget is not an opinion blog for someone. Engadget is news about... gadgets.
Engadget certainly welcomes the traffic and attention offering news bring.
Is it great work? No. Is it possible given the speed of the gadget news cycle? Yes.
And I read that article before it was taken down, it was total fluff. It shouldn't ever have been posted. They should have taken it down and left the editor's explanation in place.
But seriously, Android-fan readers need to calm the fuck down. This inconsequential editing gaffe doesn't mean Engadget hates anyone's phone, nor love anyone else's phone, or have any special conspiracy-driven agenda to hide bad press for Apple. It reveals the profound insecurity of that forum's collective mentality when they say things like that and get a lot of people agreeing.
I know the EVO has been getting socked in the press for its battery life (and these complaints are legitimate), but really it's a cool phone with a lot to offer and all signs point to the launch going very well for a Sprint phone. Re-lax.
No, it probably couldn't; the entire premise of what they are doing is bad tech journalism. Comparing something that doesn't have any concrete data to a recently released phone, declare half the things subjective, and then draw conclusions.
The only thing they could have done to improve it without takedown is put a big disclaimer at the top, “Journalism is hard. Sorry about the pile of poop below. We dropped the ball on this one.”
> The only thing they could have done to improve it without takedown is put a big disclaimer at the top, “Journalism is hard. Sorry about the pile of poop below. We dropped the ball on this one.”
That would be a perfectly acceptable solution ;-)
A disclaimer stating all data on the iPhone 4 is from spec-sheets would do too.
It would not be hard to make a comparison matrix between the two phones from the data that's publicly available. With the proper disclaimer, it wouldn't even be a bad article - just a very preliminary one. You don't need to refrain from reporting on an important development (Apple announcing a phone is important) when you have incomplete data - all you need is to clearly state that.
Seems like one of the better reviews I've read, mostly pointing out that which is best depends on several factors such as where you live, what kind of apps you use etc.
In reality, you can't make a good comparison between a phone that was just launched and one that hasn't been. You end-up comparing press-releases, something the tech press was never afraid to do.
What if Engadget honestly deleted the article/poll for the reasons that they described in their response? Then who is being more manipulative, HN with our speculative take of the events (referring to the post title), or them?
The article itself was quite favorable toward the EVO, so claiming that they would be upset by favorable results toward EVO in the poll is kind of nonsensical.
of course they responded somehow, that's the next best thing after not silently removing once published poll. we can hope their intentions are clear, but we know nearly for sure the poll was there, some voting happened and then it was removed (the 'nearly' being the possibility of the story all made up by androidforums.)
There's no proof that it had anything to do with the poll; that's pure conjecture on their part. The only reason the forum posters feel that way is because it was all they cared about; they wanted EVO to win this meaningless poll. If we take Engadget at their word, they probably didn't even look at the poll when deciding to remove the article; they were more concerned about the quality of the article itself.
My point is, I agree with you; I hate manipulative media as well. That's why I think that on HN, we should not be using sensationalist titles with unconfirmed inferences like the one in the title of this post, and we should be discussing this from a more neutral point of view. Otherwise we're just as guilty as anyone else.
Check your frothing-at-the-mouth fan boy-ism at the door. If they did what you're accusing them off why not just rig the poll so that apple wins no matter what?
They probably quickly realized how stupid this kind of poll is. The online tech community will all run out and vote one way and the actual market will probably do the opposite, so what's the point?
Having read the article with the editor's comments in mind, it looks quite clear to me that they're guilty as charged: There was perfectly adequate disclaiming of the fact that the iPhone details were preliminary and that neither was a clear winner.
My internal merit rating for Engadget has been reset to zero.
You should reset it to 0 for such shoddy writing. For example, here is the text on the camera section:
The EVO has higher resolution cameras front and back (8 megapixel / 1.3
megapixel, vs. 5 megapixel / VGA). Apple claims its low resolution sensor
around back is to improve the low light performance, and both manufacturers
are using the same "backside illuminated" tech. We'll have to let these duke
it out in the wild (we've only seen professionally-produced samples from
Apple's camera), but the EVO wins the spec war.
Looks like speculative nonsense to me. Anyone who knows anything about digital cameras knows that published megapixel spec wars are almost never valuable (for example, my D700 is out-megapixeled by even some high-end point-and-shoots! But I can tell you which camera can capture the scene more faithfully in any condition, every time). Until the iPhone 4 is in hand and people can evaluate its camera, there is no way to know if the iPhone has a better, worse, or equivalent camera. All we have right now from Apple are slick marketing materials produced by professional photographers, many of which probably had assistants using reflectors or lights to help smooth out the dynamic range.
This was an article that shouldn't ever have been published, and clearly was basically a hype piece that slipped through editing during the press blitzkrieg of WWDC.
I read through the comments and what I noticed is that many of the commentors seem to take it as a slight against them personally. To me it is a perfect example of why we need to not be religious about technology. It is just a damn phone.
Yes there is an issue of whether or not Engadget has a bias, and they very well might. It is just too hard to make sense of through the noise of zealotry.
Anecdotally and simply observed over the years, individuals seem to be very defensive about what they choose to spend their money on, but how defensive they are decreases as their income increases. Houses. Colleges. Cars. Big-ticket electronic items.
I'm curious, does anyone have any interesting material or studies that have looked into this phenomenon?
From memory (sorry no source) I believe it is related to the amount of emotional tension the individual experiences, and the release felt, in making the purchase. It is not the amount of money involved. So taking two people with the same income and net worth, if one person gets very emotionally committed and spends a lot of time socializing and projecting how great product X is going to be and feeling bad because he doesn't have it yet, and the other person just buys it on a lark? The first person will tend to be very dogmatic, perhaps religious or irrational, about the value of the product. This effect is culmulative.
By the way, this "release" that is felt after the immediate purchase has a tremendous cognitive blinding ability. The purchaser is something like 100 times more willing to buy some related product in the immediate minutes after the big decision is made while the "glow" is still there. LOTS of folks make BIG money exploiting this.
By the way, the tendency among intelligent people is to view a lot of this as "psycho-babble" or some such. So they spend a lot of time online, doing research, reading various opinions, making an informed choice -- all the while falling into the trap outlined above. Except they don't see it.
Humans are really cool to observe. They are the only creatures that can act completely emotionally and then beat the heck out of you using logic and facts when you point out what's going on. That's neat
Yes, please, click on our blogspam for more blogspam about prior blogspam controversy. All on the same site! Its like getting five clickthroughs in one!
53 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 120 ms ] thread"It was a huge article. For quite a while, iPhone 4 was ahead. I did a few page refreshes and EVO 4G was starting to catch up really fast. Next time I refreshed, the article disappeared without a trace....down the memory hole, like it never existed...many hundreds of comments in a couple of hours."
The other 10% are the ones reading a tech journal online and already have a fixed opinion on what they would get, so the playground analogy of "I want my favourite to win" is very well fitting to this situation.
Let's also not kid ourselves that there was some genuine gold or masterpiece of literature in the comments either (more likely some variant on the laughably naive "when will the world wake up and realise that they DON'T WANT A CLOSED PHONE OS"); the entire world would be better off if stuff like this wasn't even given the oxygen of publicity.
You're not even able to say that n% of Engadget readers felt some way, because the population of people who happen to show up while the survey is open is still not randomly selected within that demographic: what day of the week did you post it? Did someone with an axe to grind promote the blog post for you on another site, on facebook, or some IRC channel...on Colbert?
Respondents have to be randomly selected, and this is widely known. But since polls generate traffic and engage the readership everybody looks the other way. Even on esteemed sites like HN where everybody should know better - although I have faith that it's not done here for the purpose of generating traffic.
I'm an old fart, and "journalism" is an accolade that I would never bestow upon a techno-lust blog. Still, this event is dubious.
But it's not like the poll was actual quantitative measurement, so the world didn't lose anything of value beyond whatever dubious value it had to fanbois and rabid detractors alike.
Write a second article apologizing for the first one. Don't make the first article disappear.
This is seriously bad journalism.
People make mistakes, this doesn't really bother me too much, especially since they have apologized and promised a more in-depth re-post in the future.
What does bother me is how crazy people are getting about this. I understand being a fan of something, but there's such a thing as taking it too far. Yeesh.
Engadget certainly welcomes the traffic and attention offering news bring.
And I read that article before it was taken down, it was total fluff. It shouldn't ever have been posted. They should have taken it down and left the editor's explanation in place.
But seriously, Android-fan readers need to calm the fuck down. This inconsequential editing gaffe doesn't mean Engadget hates anyone's phone, nor love anyone else's phone, or have any special conspiracy-driven agenda to hide bad press for Apple. It reveals the profound insecurity of that forum's collective mentality when they say things like that and get a lot of people agreeing.
I know the EVO has been getting socked in the press for its battery life (and these complaints are legitimate), but really it's a cool phone with a lot to offer and all signs point to the launch going very well for a Sprint phone. Re-lax.
The only thing they could have done to improve it without takedown is put a big disclaimer at the top, “Journalism is hard. Sorry about the pile of poop below. We dropped the ball on this one.”
That would be a perfectly acceptable solution ;-)
A disclaimer stating all data on the iPhone 4 is from spec-sheets would do too.
It would not be hard to make a comparison matrix between the two phones from the data that's publicly available. With the proper disclaimer, it wouldn't even be a bad article - just a very preliminary one. You don't need to refrain from reporting on an important development (Apple announcing a phone is important) when you have incomplete data - all you need is to clearly state that.
http://www.sprintusers.com/forum/showpost.php?p=2355928
http://www.sprintusers.com/forum/showpost.php?p=2355929
Seems like one of the better reviews I've read, mostly pointing out that which is best depends on several factors such as where you live, what kind of apps you use etc.
In reality, you can't make a good comparison between a phone that was just launched and one that hasn't been. You end-up comparing press-releases, something the tech press was never afraid to do.
The poll is back up in that article, and now the iPhone is winning..
I seriously couldn't care less about EVO 4G or iPhone. But I loath and fear manipulative media like nothing in the world.
The article itself was quite favorable toward the EVO, so claiming that they would be upset by favorable results toward EVO in the poll is kind of nonsensical.
My point is, I agree with you; I hate manipulative media as well. That's why I think that on HN, we should not be using sensationalist titles with unconfirmed inferences like the one in the title of this post, and we should be discussing this from a more neutral point of view. Otherwise we're just as guilty as anyone else.
They probably quickly realized how stupid this kind of poll is. The online tech community will all run out and vote one way and the actual market will probably do the opposite, so what's the point?
We can as well replace EVO and iPhone4 with windows/linux and let the internet slug it out. Once more.
http://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?q=http%3a%2f%2fwww.engadget.c...
My internal merit rating for Engadget has been reset to zero.
This was an article that shouldn't ever have been published, and clearly was basically a hype piece that slipped through editing during the press blitzkrieg of WWDC.
Yes there is an issue of whether or not Engadget has a bias, and they very well might. It is just too hard to make sense of through the noise of zealotry.
I'm curious, does anyone have any interesting material or studies that have looked into this phenomenon?
By the way, this "release" that is felt after the immediate purchase has a tremendous cognitive blinding ability. The purchaser is something like 100 times more willing to buy some related product in the immediate minutes after the big decision is made while the "glow" is still there. LOTS of folks make BIG money exploiting this.
By the way, the tendency among intelligent people is to view a lot of this as "psycho-babble" or some such. So they spend a lot of time online, doing research, reading various opinions, making an informed choice -- all the while falling into the trap outlined above. Except they don't see it.
Humans are really cool to observe. They are the only creatures that can act completely emotionally and then beat the heck out of you using logic and facts when you point out what's going on. That's neat
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sourceid=chrome...