John Gruber jumps the shark

http://whydoeseverythingsuck.com/2010/06/john-gruber-jumps-shark.html

by bdfh42 • 16 years ago

128 116 16 years ago

raganwald3• 16 years ago

Nit: "Jumped the shark" or "Jumping the Shark" does not mean "Has started to suck." It's a specific subset of suckage where the subject is clearly aware that they have no new ideas and resorts to ever-more desperate tricks to try to appear fresh and new.

noonespecial2• 16 years ago

I know (especially by the quick upvotes) that you are preaching to the choir here, but I have noticed a lot of non-thechnical, non-geek, never-even-heard-of-happy-days types beginning to use this phrase (incorrectly) just in the past few months. I've given up explaining who the Fonz is and just accepted this new reality.

Once a meme goes mainstream, the primary idiom dilutes with use until its just a curios catch phrase.

I just nod, smile and go to my happy place where there's a guy water-skiing in a leather jacket...

raganwald3• 16 years ago

Well, I don't mind so much that the origin is lost, it becomes a pleasant bit of trivia I will inflict upon my hapless colleagues one day, just as I now explain exactly what the phrase "core dump" really means.

But in this case I do like keeping true to the specific meaning even if the origin is lost in antiquity. I feel it's a useful distinction to make. As an example, I would say that some years ago John Dvorak jumped the shark when he turned his public personal into a troll. As a counter-example, Joel Spolsky didn't jump the shark: He woke up one day and decided that his blog had run its course.

I hope we are able to save some of its distinct meaning until some other phrase comes along with a similar usage.

ekanes• 16 years ago

> Once a meme goes mainstream, the primary idiom dilutes with use until its just a curios catch phrase.

I don't know if it'd qualify as a meme, but the term "hacker" would be another example of this.

ZeroGravitas2• 16 years ago

Is self-awareness of your lack of originality really vital?

The guy who claims to have come up with the phrase doesn't seem to think so:

http://web.archive.org/web/20000817233601/www.jumptheshark.c...

Q. What is jumping the shark?

A. It's a moment. A defining moment when you know that your favorite television program has reached its peak. That instant that you know from now on...it's all downhill. Some call it the climax. We call it "Jumping the Shark." From that moment on, the program will simply never be the same.

raganwald3• 16 years ago

Thanks for a great reply!

Looking at the original episode of "Happy Days," I find it difficult to believe that the producers were not keenly aware that they had walked away from the show's concept and were now milking cheap popularity for all it was worth.

I suspect that the definition you give and the one I use are compatible even though they differ. Under the definition you give, the defining moment is really set by the viewer. It's the instant you know it's all downhill from here, not the actual peak. So Gruber's phrase might be the defining moment for Hank.

It's also possible, as was the case for Happy Days, that the producers turn cynical and start resorting to cheap tricks like throwing out all character development and turning the show into a parody of itself, focusing on a caricature minor character rather than the more well-rounded principals. That's the definition I prefer.

They could go together, and I would say there's value in combining them, as in:

"I realized that HN had Jumped the Shark when Paul introduced the Date-a-Hacker feature."

commandar• 16 years ago

"It was probably an off-hand comment, but it speaks volumes about where John's current psyche is. He said:

iPhone critics have seldom let facts get in their way."

That line actually bothered me too, but for me it was triggered by John's recent decision to start attacking Android for somehow using private APIs on the sly because he couldn't be bothered to A. understand the basic architecture of Android (those pesky facts; things that anybody who'd spent 20 minutes skimming the intro to the Android SDK could tell you) and B. the fact that he almost willfully ignores that Android is architected differently than the iPhone, and that things that would be system-level calls on the iPhone are handled at the application level via public system calls, even for Google's own applications.

This just happens to be something I can put my finger on; like the article's author, there's just been something about his tone recently that's been kind of off-putting to me. He seems quicker to jump at things simply for the sake of snark over correctness, which is a little bothersome for somebody who has a reputation for being a stickler for detail. It sucks because he's somebody that in the past I saw as being able to trust to get a take on things that was at least fair, even if I disagreed with him. Lately I find myself rolling my eyes at his posts often as not.

ubernostrum2• 16 years ago

I guess I take it a bit differently -- the stuff he's usually responding to is from "respected industry commentators" like Rob Enderle or Paul Thurrott and, well, the record kinda speaks for itself. Mainstream coverage tends to pretty consistently publish a lot of things which are flat-out not true (e.g., the oft-repeated claim that iPods can only play music purchased from the iTunes store). And, for better or worse, that's what Gruber is typically harping on.

mtts• 16 years ago

I'm under the impression that the amount of writing about other tech writers on Daring Fireball has increased during the last few months at the expense of writing about, well, tech.

Which makes the site less pleasant to read for me.

And in a sense it's "jumping the shark" - having run out of ideas, the John Gruber show is starting to fill episodes with unlikely, contrived subplots that have nothing to do with the original premise of the show, which was to write, in depth, about Apple products.

niceguy1012• 16 years ago

From the comments:

'Gruber even edits his posts without disclosing it. I saw him call Apple's decision to ban an app as a "nameless individual App Store reviewer" fault and not Apple's!'

The irony is that Gruber's fame originates from the outrage related to his app rejection.

gjm112• 16 years ago

> The irony is that Gruber's fame originates from the outrage related to his app rejection.

Huh? Gruber's fame, such as it is, originates from the fact that for years he has been writing a blog filled with mostly-Apple-related stuff that lots of people (mostly Apple users) like reading. Daring Fireball has been a big noise in Apple-land since before there even was an App Store.

jroes• 16 years ago

He also did Markdown.

niceguy1012• 16 years ago

I stand corrected. Thanks for the info. I came to know about the site after that app rejection. Thought the site came into light after that issue. My bad.

thedjpetersen• 16 years ago

Out of curiousity, which could somebody link to the post about app rejection?

bolden• 16 years ago

No such post. Gruber hasn't suggested that he's submitted anything to the App Store. He has written several posts about others' rejected apps.

tommorris• 16 years ago

The phrase "jumped the shark" has definitely jumped the shark.

pohl4• 16 years ago

iPhone critics have seldom let facts get in their way.

Essentially, anyone who has criticized the iPhone, or presumably Apple is just someone not dealing with the facts.

Hank, your critique falls apart when you switch what should be an existential quantifier with a universal quantifier.

jdminhbg2• 16 years ago

No, the error there is Gruber's.

"Americans rarely get any exercise."

"French people rarely bathe."

If Gruber doesn't want it to be taken as "all iPhone critics," he should specify.

pohl4• 16 years ago

No, the error is Hank's, for not reading that sentence in context. John is addressing an existential claim made by Jason Snell:

Snell’s argument is that Apple should do this to nip the argument that the iPhone is too closed. But if Apple did exactly what Snell argues, critics would still harp on the closed App Store.

foljs4• 16 years ago

No, the error is people not understanding "generalization", a very useful tool in any conversation and one of the pillars of logic itself.

gabrielroth• 16 years ago

Like all prominent bloggers, Gruber could use some insightful criticism. Too bad this post doesn't offer any. A thousand words that add up to "I can't really put my finger on it or name any specifics, but Daring Fireball seems more uncritically approving of Apple lately" is fine for pub conversation, but it's not much use as reasoned argument. How could Gruber respond to this?

The only specific point of Gruber's that the author cites is "iPhone critics have seldom let facts get in their way." I'm sure there's something to criticize in that statement, but it's a pretty slender reed on which to hang a blanket condemnation of dozens of articles.

bradleyland2• 16 years ago

I agree 100%. I think the reality is probably closer to this.

In the past, Hank probably agreed with John more than he disagreed, so it was easy for him to resolve any internal conflict; there was little of it. This was during a time when Apple primarily made desktop/laptop computers with a standard desktop operating system -- as opposed to operating systems like iPhone OS -- that was sufficiently Unix-like to please most geeks with a bend toward the Unix mindset.

The conflict comes in the fact that the Unix mindset allied with the hacker mindset. Some would argue they're one and the same. Apple's new direction (iPhone OS) cuts the hacker off from the Unix-y underpinnings of the device. To take it a step further, you can't easily run native software you developed yourself on a variety of devices. So there's a cognitive dissonance developing within many Mac users. Their Mac-self wants to continue to enjoy the use of tools from the one company who seems to share the same values as them (well-built products, Unix-y ideas), but their geek-self is struggling with the loss of access to the parts that satisfy the hacker inside.

I can identify with Hank, because despite finding no logical flaw with Gruber's arguments, I disagree with him. There is an indisputable subjective component to selecting tools. Gruber's inner-hacker is also offended by Apple's stance of the walled garden, but he recognizes that this offense is separate and unrelated to whether or not the product is a "good product", and he realizes that most of the world aren't hackers. This leads him to generally positive-leaning comments. At least in the context of potential market success. To put it simply, most people don't care that they can't get to a shell prompt on their iPad. They're perfectly happy browsing their iTunes library, watching YouTube, and reading web pages.

I wish I had a good wrap-up/ending, but I just kind of hammered that out on the fly. Maybe I'll use it as the basis for a blog post.

pohl4• 16 years ago

Well said.

jordanroher2• 16 years ago

I agree wholeheartedly with the inner conflict aspect, but I wonder about Gruber's inner hacker as it applies to the App Store.

From his projects page, it seems that Gruber works on small command-line tools and extensions to other people's software. I'm not trying to impugn his coding credentials; his writing doesn't hinge on how far he's made it past HELLO WORLD. But none of the software he writes would be the sort of thing that would make it on to the App Store even if Apple fired their reviewers and opened the floodgates.

He takes the "Apple does X because it's in their best interests to do X" stance because his livelihood doesn't hinge on whether the App Store is open, closed, or purple.

I suspect we'd have a very different Daring Fireball if he finished his dream mail app "Letters" and tried to release it on the App Store. Would it be rejected because it "duplicates existing functionality?" Or because someone can use it to e-mail the Kama Sutra? Or some other arbitrary rule Apple has yet to invent? Or would he not even bother, for fear of wasting time developing software that he couldn't sell?

betageek2• 16 years ago

Agree with the gist of this, but it's not just the geeks that are getting fed up with Apple. Apple's core "black t-shirt wearing design hipsters" user base are very annoyed with the Adobe/Flash situation which is causing them even more cognitive dissonance.

ob• 16 years ago

Gruber regularly deals with critics that will write basically anything, even criticizing products that have not been announce yet.

Hank Williams' statement:

   Essentially, anyone who has criticized the iPhone, or
   presumably Apple is just someone not dealing with the
   facts. The only reasonable position one could have after
   looking at any iPhone related facts is, generally,
   acceptance and approval.

strikes me as nonsense. It doesn't even follow from Gruber's original statement. I.e. "seldom" means "not often", it doesn't mean "never". So "anyone who has criticized the iPhone" just doesn't follow.

And unless the so-called "facts" are not indeed facts ("a thing that is indisputable the case") then yes, "the only reasonable position one could have after looking at any iPhone related fact" is "acceptance". IT IS A FACT!

You can criticize the iPhone, but if you say "people are not buying it" then you are arguing against the facts.

sounddust• 16 years ago

The author writes an entire article accusing Gruber of failing to follow his assumptions to a truthful conclusion without giving a single example of him doing so.

I think that there's a lot of criticism toward Gruber because his opinions are not a carbon-copy of the unified public geek opinion that you'd see on a site like Slashdot. I think it's refreshing to see a solitary source of Apple commentary in which the author actually attempts to understand Apple's motivations rather than blindly lambast them. Gruber is not afraid to criticize Apple (I've read dozens of criticisms of the app store approval process, for example).

And that's always been his attitude: The opinions from someone who is a long-time fan of Apple products and does not instantly overreact to every news story about them like most tech sites. You can't accuse someone of jumping the shark for consistently doing what they've been doing for years.

cromulent• 16 years ago

I would add that you also have to judge DF's trajectory against Apple's.

In the six or so years that DF has been running, Apple's product range, market share, mind share, and market capitalization have all grown remarkably (if not their own internal attitude), and with that has come a flood of both supporters and critics.

DF is not commenting on fringe products such as OSX 10.3 anymore. He's commenting on a major mobile phone manufacturer and the maker of an popular and unusual new computing tablet.

I would venture that Gruber feels no need to feed the Apple supporters, but he does feel a need to call the critics out when they just don't understand Apple or advise Apple to behave more like other tech companies.

samps• 16 years ago

In this light, maybe people have started to be annoyed more by Gruber because, although his style and opinions haven't changed, he's suddenly for the Empire instead of the underdog. I have a feeling there would be much less anti-Gruber vitriol if he were defending an Apple that still seemed to be the "alternative" rather than the "mainstream".

scottmagdalein• 16 years ago

Bloviating waste of time.

npp• 16 years ago

Gruber does approach technology from a pro-Apple viewpoint, but many of his articles are at least organized around verifiable facts, though some may argue with his opinions or conclusions. In most (though not all) Gruber articles, it is at least not hard to tell which part is the facts he started with and which part is the opinion that some may disagree with. This is so basic, but most blogs are a complete muddle.

kmfrk2• 16 years ago

It wouldn't be gauche to accuse him of reaching the viewpoints because of his reasoning rather than the other way around, as tempting as it is to pin some predicate related to Apple on him. :)

eli• 16 years ago

If you're going to accuse someone of writing weak arguments, you should probably make sure that your own argument is really well supported.

watty• 16 years ago

One Apple blogger accusing another Apple blogger of being a fanboi? Does this really need to be top of HN?

Edit: Can you at least reply when you down vote? I know this was voted to the top of HN so it deserves to be there.

steveklabnik• 16 years ago

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foljs4• 16 years ago

no, we can't.

isleyaardvark• 16 years ago

It was probably an off-hand comment, but it speaks volumes about where John's current psyche is. He said:

iPhone critics have seldom let facts get in their way.

It does say a lot about John's thinking. He's thinking that there is a lot of criticism of the iPhone is not based on facts. Not only did he link to an earlier article that very day that had 10 reasons not to buy an iPad that Gruber says got 9 out of 10 reasons factually wrong (http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/06/03/warman), but the very same article that quote appears in discusses misconceptions about the iPhone that are factually wrong. (Can I load my own videos and music on it, or only stuff I buy from Apple?)

smackfu4• 16 years ago

Here's the full context:

"Snell’s argument is that Apple should do this to nip the argument that the iPhone is too closed. But if Apple did exactly what Snell argues, critics would still harp on the closed App Store. iPhone critics have seldom let facts get in their way."

ZeroGravitas2• 16 years ago

Funnily enough, my own thoughts about Gruber becoming annoying recently (after reading him for years) is because Gruber has started commenting on things he doesn't understand the facts of e.g. codec patents. He'll just come up with some pro-Apple spin and go with that, actual reality is often replaced with spiteful snark.

e.g.

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/06/03/android-battery-...

The first thing I did with my iPhone 3G was turn off some battery draining options I didn't need. Some people, not me, actually turned off 3G altogether. No, it wasn't fun. iPhone and smartphone battery life is an issue for everyone.

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/06/03/google-pictures

Actually Bing shows a random professional image, not one of your choice from your photo album. Is that not an important enough difference to stand in the way of publishing this hilarious jab at Google.

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/05/21/webm-patents

Uncritically passing on patent threats just because it suits Apple's strategic posturing? Adding commentary to make it seem like a done deal rather than posturing? Ignoring the fact that they'd said they would do this before Google even announced VP8 and indeed have said similar about Vorbis for a decade?.

Also, much like Steve Jobs's one liners, you do get the feeling that cutting and pasting a link is such hard work on the iPad that you're luck to get more than a couple of words of commentary.

danh2• 16 years ago

Also (from right now) it seems that Gruber doesn't know what browser sniffing is (or at least pretends to), but still has an opinion:

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/06/04/html5-safari-ope...

Lewisham2• 16 years ago

Yeah, this piece really riled me.

I agree with the original post, he has been pushing harder and harder on Apple doing the right things with its control complex, whereas previously he wouldn't have done. If you swapped "Apple" from some of the pieces on the App Store and HTML5 stuff with "Microsoft" or "Adobe", you could be sure he'd be a frothy mess.

I loved the Gruber of old. Where's he gone? Why is it just "If you don't love Apple, you can git out?" Fortunately, at least Wil Shipley has been holding his feet to the fire on Twitter, but I don't know why Gruber's gone this route at all.

jacobolus6• 16 years ago

What’s hard to understand about Apple’s pages?

> The demos below show how Apple’s Safari web browser supports the capabilities of web standards such as HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript.

Gruber’s point is this: if Opera wants some better “HTML5” demos (presumably that work across browsers, and don’t just “use HTML5 as a buzzword”) they can easily make some themselves. Why should Apple be responsible for making sure their Safari promotion showcase works perfectly in every other browser?

As for why they block other browsers: probably some or most of the demos break in some way or another. If a naive user with (say) Firefox visited a page and the layout looked like shit and nothing worked, the user would quite reasonably think that Apple’s site was broken.

danh2• 16 years ago

But he does now (a couple of hours later):

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/06/04/modernizr

Apparently after reading HN:

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/06/04/df-hn

boucher• 16 years ago

Unfortunately, it started a few years ago when Gruber took a break from writing anything interesting and decided to focus all of his energy for months on the thoroughly uninteresting wi-fi macbook hack story (on which he was ultimately pretty wrong).

There have been some real gems in the last year, like when Gruber took it upon himself to declare the A4 the most advanced mobile computing chip ever created (despite knowing essentially nothing about what the A4 actually was).

tptacek2• 16 years ago

I honestly don't remember what Gruber wrote about the Macbook hack, but I remember us writing about it (back when we blogged current events in security), and I remember a back-and-forth with Gruber, and why I'm bringing this up is: do we actually know anything definitive about what happened with the wifi hack?

I'm not sure we do, 'boucher.

jacobolus6• 16 years ago

> Actually Bing shows a random professional image, not one of your choice from your photo album.

I think you kind of missed the point. To whit: putting an image behind the search engine homepage is a stupid gimmick which adds nothing to the value to my search results.

papachito• 16 years ago

Not really, in ChromeOS, the google homepage will be kind of like your desktop. So putting a picture there is like putting a picture on your desktop wallpaper. Also, Google.com/ig has been themable for years, so allowing to put pictures is not a copy of bing IMO, just an improvement of the theme feature.

look_lookatme• 16 years ago

Normal people love this kind of stuff. When they use a computer they like to see their kids photos all over the place, or their beach house they saved up for, or their dogs, or whatever. They want their computer desktop to be like their physical desktop.

Just because you don't appreciate it doesn't mean it's a "stupid gimmick".

EDIT: clarify a point

petercooper• 16 years ago

Funnily enough, my own thoughts about Gruber becoming annoying recently (after reading him for years) is because Gruber has started commenting on things he doesn't understand the facts of

If you think he's annoying, stop reading what he posts?

There are a people pushing words around on the Internet that are outlandish or that others don't agree with. Thankfully, most of them don't result in hundreds of comments and discussions over their shortcomings.

adolph• 16 years ago

I think another interesting quote is:

"I used to trust John Gruber. Now I will just read him."

I'm not certain what there is to trust about Gruber--follow the links and read things through if it is interesting. I'm mostly a fan of "claim chowder," so maybe the author is focused on other things.

smackfu4• 16 years ago

Wow, I hate the "claim chowder". The worst kind of journalism.

cpr2• 16 years ago

Why? Shouldn't journalists (including Gruber) be held to some kind of truthy standard about their claims?

llimllib• 16 years ago

> To be clear I am not suggesting Gruber is being in any way disingenuous in his arguments

Yes, you are. That is in fact exactly what you are doing.

antidaily• 16 years ago

Gruber is so angry these days. There's no more excitement. It's all defensive and pissed-off writing.

danudey• 16 years ago

I'm guessing you didn't read DF after the iPad announcement. The sense I got from Gruber was that he knew it was world-changing, but until you've used it you don't really understand why. He was thrilled about the potential but couldn't explain it to anyone. He was very excited, make no mistake.

KirinDave3• 16 years ago

So, Protip: The word “fanboi” is as ridiculous and juvenile as ”M$”, ”demorat”, “republiscams”, or any other goofy little pun moniker. I half expected the final paragraph to close with an “All Your Base” reference after seeing the word “fanboi”.

I know people don't read Hank for the cleverly barbed and expertly crafted prose... but, really? Fanboi?

frou_dh• 16 years ago

This needs to be broadcast to the entire internet population. It's incredible how widespread (and instantly reached for) the term and its conventionally spelled sibling have become.

WiseWeasel2• 16 years ago

The difference is that there are (seldom) times when it's socially acceptable to use the word "fanboy", but it's never OK to say "fanboi".

mikeklaas• 16 years ago

shrug, I feel the same way about "Protip"

KirinDave3• 16 years ago

I feel the same way about saying physical gestures like "shrug". And also about "Wow. Just Wow." But I can master my distaste for those; they're not why I mentioned it. Who knows what the line is?

Maybe it's more because using gay terms as pejoratives is a nasty habit and we should stamp it out rather than try and equivocate just because they're familiar.

tjmaxal• 16 years ago

It's pretty bad when the author continuously does what he is accusing the rest of the world of doing wrong.

ryanwaggoner• 16 years ago

I'm not at all sure I see the difference in Gruber saying "iPhone critics have seldom let facts get in their way." and Williams saying "Of course in the current climate, conservatism seems to be becoming more "fact free" (think Obama birth certificate and death panels), so there are fewer reasonably argued ideas to embrace."

WiseWeasel2• 16 years ago

Well, to be pedantic, one is an absolute judgment, the other is a relative one. "Seldom" implies that a significant majority of iPhone critics do not let facts get in their way. "Becoming more" implies that there is a trend towards freedom from facts, but does not place a judgment on the absolute degree of fact-freedom.

pauljonas• 16 years ago

For me, the Gruber-bot jumped the shark a long time ago.

I really don't get the appeal of his writing — other than an occasional Apple apologetic, it appears to be nothing more than a tumblelog of Apple bits, but yet he's paid a premium for it, due to high profile linkage…

marbletiles• 16 years ago

Gruber hasn't changed in the slightest. The only thing that has changed is sentiment here towards Apple. Because you disagree with him, you're more likely to judge him harshly.

I don't agree with him entirely often either, but god am I glad there's someone making the case for the App Store, mostly coherently.

Tech is driven by sentiment much more than people would like to admit. Android was a not-quite-there until IO 2010, now it's the new hot. What changed? Very little, technically. A lot, rhetorically.

Same here.

kmfrk2• 16 years ago

I have grown to like Gruber more in the last couple of months---heck, I've just grown to like him at all. I don't think it has anything to do with him changing, but rather myself or my perception of him. It could be both, too, of course.

I still think he should refrain from talking about politics, though, but the idiosyncrasy of the blog is also a part of its charm. I just wish he would ditch this one.

SixtySe7en2• 16 years ago

The difference between Gruber and Williams? Gruber makes very clear (in his columns and Twitter feed) that he is brutally honest about his subjectivity on all issues. Willams pretends he is "objective", the same way Paul Thurrott, John Dvorak, Rob Enderle and Joe Wilcox all claim to be "objective" about Apple specifically, and other issues in general. Who has jumped the shark?

mandingo5512• 16 years ago

What was it that Gruber called web apps? Oh, right. Shit sandwiches.

billymeltdown• 16 years ago

Y'know, I used to think he was a blow-hard, but his writing style has really grown on me. The guy is thorough, and thoughtful (if sometimes extremely caustic), and I think he helps raise the bar of commentary by way of example as well as ridicule.

I wonder how many of his detractors have actually unsubscribed from DF in their feed readers?

col_kurtz2• 16 years ago

Gruber continually comments about topics unrelated to why people are reading his blog. It's like, great dude, you like Stanley Kubrick. Great dude, you're a liberal. Great dude, you like baseball. No one gives a fuck! Write about apple and tech. DF is too popular to digress and distract into a personal blog like it still has only a few thousand hits a day.

sirsean• 16 years ago

Yeah, what a waste. You should cancel your subscription to save all the money you wasted by reading those 20-word snippets of text.

What? It's still free? And people are still allowed to write about what they want to, and not what YOU want them to?

That IS weird.

col_kurtz2• 16 years ago

Because staying on point isn't a civil rights issue, jackass. This is why most blogs aren't considered real journalism and require, as Jobs said this week, "oversight" to be considered fully legit.

If Walt Mossberg suddenly digressed into his favorite movie or what he likes for dinner while he's reviewing a product, I would call that unprofessional.

So what it means is people like Gruber are pseudo-professional journalists who are mixing amateurish diary entries about their personal life and topics they don't know about along with the commentary that actually brought them alot of hits in the first place.

And don't even get started about "free". Because it's not subscription but he gets paid thousands through advertising, but I'm not "paying for it"? Just like more legit journalists do. And if something's free I can't complain I suppose...

case closed.

mandingo5512• 16 years ago

What I love most about Gruber is his inexplicable nature to post links without commenting on it. The sheer brilliance of it is amazing.

It's like an escape hatch—it gives him the opportunity to say whatever he wants without owning up to anything. Like the Foxconn suicides.

"I linked to the “hey, Foxconn’s suicide rate sounds high but it’s lower than China’s overall rate” thing not as proof that everything is just fine at Foxconn, but for context"

Right, sure pal. Whatever you say.

cpr2• 16 years ago

This almost isn't worth replying to, but if you don't know the history of Daring Fireball, you might be correctly confused.

He used to split his feeds into an occasional commentary and sometimes several-times daily links. He combined them a while back, so now you get mostly links mixed in with very occasional commentary in a single feed. I.e., nothing has really changed.

turkeyneck• 16 years ago

I'd just want to quibble a bit about the 'jumping point.'

Rather than the extended MacBook hack, the more recent breast-beating defense of Apple's questionable behavior about the lost iPhone prototype fiasco is what got me to suspect the shark has been left aways behind by DF.

The guy's not a legal scholar and I doubt he'd claim any expertise in this dept. but yet EARLY ON in the ordeal was parroting the legal talking points that law-and-order types were breaking out about how Gizmodo was way out of its journalistic bounds and ever-so-guilty of outrageous criminal activity.

The actual circumstance of a friggin' cell phone being left in a bar by a drunk employee wouldn't produce much notice from anyone but this stupid incident managed to get folks to line up defending one side or the other in a matter that will be obviously moot in a matter of weeks. Then and now.

What's the BFD, I gotta ask Gruber? But he's gotten quite defensive of late. Like today about this thread.

wolfish• 16 years ago

I started feeling the same way a few months ago. It is hard to define exactly what changed. Some of the time I question whether it might have been me that changed rather than Gruber. It's validating that other's are starting to feel the same way though.

foljs4• 16 years ago

My take on DF:

http://bananaranha.com/post/285263169/can-you-guess-the-blog

tomica2• 16 years ago

(all from gruber in 2007) http://daringfireball.net/2007/06/wwdc_2007_keynote

Web Apps as the Route for iPhone Development

[...]

It’s insulting, because it’s not a way to write iPhone apps, and you can’t bullshit developers. It’s a matter of spin.

[..]

If all you have to offer is a shit sandwich, just say it. Don’t tell us how lucky we are and that it’s going to taste delicious.

(compare to anything from gruber on web apps in 2010) http://daringfireball.net/

ahrencode• 16 years ago

My uninvited opinion posted on Hank's blog, and adding here (based on Gruber's recent post pointing here): Gruber is a smart, measured and often witty commentator, but if you want him at his irrational best, look not for Apple apologia, but his vacant WordPress sneers and attacks (themselves stand-ins for animus towards the GPL, I think).

(here's my comment on one such instance: http://ahren.org/code/bit/john-grubers-15-minutes-of-schaden...)

John Gruber jumps the shark

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