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Dvorak Admits To Trolling Mac Users
jalefkowit writes "Tech pundit John Dvorak has long been known for his inflammatory opinions. Many have suspected that these opinions are just a way to drive up traffic to his column. Now, we have it straight from the horse's mouth: Dave Winer has Dvorak on video describing his methodology for trolling the Mac community to pump up his stats."
I have to admit I'm also guilty of posting the occasional inflammatory story, but I find it's usually best to suffix the title with a question mark, and let our ever-knowledgeable readers hash out the issue and decide for themselves.
Thats an almost impossible task - mac users are too smart to take the bait ;)
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
Direct link: http://s3.amazonaws.com/scripting/dvorak.mov?torre nt
Of course, Dvorak will just say that it's not true -- he was just trolling on that recording, thus completing the prophecy and dooming mankind.
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Dvorak is nothing other than the worlds most successful troll. As much as everyone here complains about him, we eat it up and come back for more. We used to be able to pretend it was the editors foisting him upon us... but lo' and behold, democratic Digg comes along, and he still makes the front page!
Next you will be telling me that Ann Coulter only accuses the 9/11 widows of enjoying the death of their spouses to get attention.
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The thing is though one has to understand that the Mac community is a tiered structure. At the top there are we Mac users who are experienced computer users, who understand what we are doing and how computers and operating systems work and accept the existence of things such as 'bugs' and 'vulnerabilities' etc.
Unfortunately the thing that gives us all a bad name are the very vocal ignorant users that for example simply flat out refuse to accept any criticism of Apple or it's products whatsoever - in fact I'd go as far to say it becomes a religious issue as no matter how much evidence they are confronted with, they either are not capable of comprehending what is being presented to them or if they are, refuse to even consider it as this could mean Apple *might* be wrong and as they know, this cannot possibly happen as they consider Apple infallible.
Very, very odd behaviour and quite annoying as for example, should I attempt to get someone to consider a Mac, all it takes is someone they know who has 'heard about those Mac zealots' to put them off.
Consider also that any comment on apple.slashdot that however truthful, might mention a bug or vulnerability or other otherwise is perceived as a criticism gets modded as troll or flamebait (like this comment for example), tells a lot about the community.
He makes great stats for years doing this, ups the ante by admitting that he knows it's the key to his success (thereby getting a lot of people to show up again) and now, the question is, will people stop reading him? Of course not. For the same reason that the right can't ignore Ted Rall and the left, Ann Coulter. He's the Rall and Coulter rolled into one of the tech press.
In other news, slashdot posters guilty of posting comments intended to spark debate and foster discussion of interesting topics!
It's sort of like accusing a congressman of creating and passing good legislation because he has a secret desire to get re-elected, or accusing someone of going to work to get paid. Imagine the nerve of some people!
[SNIP]Dave Winer has Dvorak on video describing his methodology for trolling the Mac community to pump up his stats." [SNIP] I have to admit I'm also guilty of posting the occasional inflammatory story, but I find it's usually best to suffix the title with a question mark, and let our ever-knowledgeable readers hash out the issue and decide for themselves.
You do it for the same reason Dvorak did it. Not to boost "stats"- to boost advertising revenue by increasign page hits. A 300-post thread is thrilling advertising-wise compared to a 30-comment thread. It's always about increasing advertising revenues.
The evil "main stream media" has a term for it: sensationalism. You should attract readers via the quality of your content, not its controversialism. These days I see the average tech story on the homepage of my city's newspaper 1, 2, 3 days before it hits slashdot- and half the time, it's an AP wire story! Gone are the days when the media outlets didn't have contacts in the tech industry or didn't "understand" it. Slashdot's become a real bore, and the quality of commentary both on the part of editors and readers has gone straight downhill.
Please help metamoderate.
Link to the video. The sound was out of sync for me, but he basically comes across as a smug arse.
but I find it's usually best to suffix the title with a question mark, and let our ever-knowledgeable readers hash out the issue and decide for themselves.
Which is, unfortunately, the case with many Slashdot (and most Digg) stories. As soon as I see a sensationalistic title ending with a question mark, I automatically skip to the next story.
Dvorak admits to trolling Mac users and Rosen admits the RIAA is wrong... apparently they know the second coming is happening soon and want to get some things off their chest.
REPENT I SAY!
Actually, this does remind me of one of those stories where someone does a scientific study to find out something that "everyone already knows."
Except, of course, we didn't all know it before, we suspected it, and assumed it was true. Every once in a while you find out that something "everyone knows" isn't true after all, so getting confirmation does have value.
We Slashdot users, of course, will never stoop to such measures just to get modded up :)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
my password really is 'stinkypants'
Trolling is nothing new especially when you look right here on Slashdot every day. What gets Slashdot the most pageviews? Stories about Microsoft. The anti MS people comment like crazy while the pro MS people do the same. I swear there could be a story about finding a cure for cancer above a story about Microsoft and the Microsoft story would have more comments.
My sig of choice is Marlboro
Ann Coulter is the rightwing Anchor Troll in their "Overton Window" strategy.
It's a simple way to force the public debate "spectrum window" to your end of the spectrum by trolling unthinkable statements in public. Successful trolls create only predictable responses, not any further development of the ideas. So the "unthinkable" is now part of the public conversation, without risking rejection by anyone actually thinking about it. Changing the ideas in the public window of the spectrum moves the window closer to the new idea. Now the window includes more of the thinkable ideas that were excluded or marginalized, while the window excludes or marginalizes the ideas previously more in the "center", but further away from the troll.
The only risk with overtonning the window is that the troll discredits its entire end of the spectrum by association. Which is why it's important that the troll make as extreme, ridiculous comments as possible. And frequently defend their statements with "I was just kidding". The associates who benefit from the troll in their neighborhood must also not even repudiate the troll, as any association (positive or negative) is contagious. The troll must work alone. Though of course they can be paid by the same beneficiaries, or have their "home markets" all subsidized by the same beneficiaries.
Now Ann Coulter actually makes sense, probably for the first time. As do her fellow trolls like Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, and most of the rightwing talkradioheads.
--
make install -not war
Now
Or was that the other end of the horse?
--- Asking inconvenient questions for over 30 years...
I said it before and I'll say it again: Dvorak is deliberately screwing the advertisers that pay for his web hits.
Dvorak publishes on PC-centric websites, but he trolls Mac users for hits. The PC advertisers are getting screwed, they pay for advertising to PC buyers, Mac users aren't the target audience. The trolling articles draw a massive influx of Mac users, the PC advertisers pay for all those hits from people that will never buy their products.
The only way Dvorak is going to stop trolling is if the PC advertisers wake up and realize their money is being wasted by a maniac that values his own ego more than he provides value for advertisers.
There's some truth to this, but only some truth..
Of the senior people I work with who were on Macs 10 years ago, at least 50% are still there, and recently some that moved on to Windows are seriously considering moving back. And I'm talking about people like chief engineers, tech directors, etc; not just "old farts" who were unwilling to learn new technologies. Where I used to work, on a "pay scale" of 3..7, with 3.5 being the average paygrade of staff, the self-supporting Mac Users list had an average paygrade of about 5.5. (And that's with a typical pyramid distribution, there were very few paygrade 7s in the company, but I'll bet 10%-15% of those were die-hard Mac users.)
The primary reason for moving away was usually "Software I wanted wasn't available on the Mac." However, the continued problems with Windows viruses, spyware, malware, etc, plus the strength of the OS X underpinnings of Unix, have been a big part of the re-connection. Most of these same people have substantial Unix backgrounds, so coming back to OS X and popping up a terminal shell, is like 'coming home'. We'll see how much effect MacTel has on the availability of software for the Mac platform.
But I count myself as a super-loyalist, and that belief was strongly reinforced by the 18 months I spent being forced to use Windows NT (versus MacOS 8 at the time), and my continued attempts to try to maintain a Windows (98->2k->now XP Pro) machine in my home environment (alongside 1 old Mac running OS 9, and 4 Macs running X.4). My informal estimate was that being on Windows cost me between 10 and 30 minutes lost productivity each day at work on the Windows box. Multiplied by 250 days in a year, times my billing rate at the tme, and that's a fair amount of money (enough to buy me a new Mac every 30 months...) And that doesn't include the cost of all the tech support that was provided on the Windows box, that didn't come out of my productivity measure.
So when I switched jobs (in part because my employer was discontinuing all support for Macs, don't get me started on that situation and the company's unwillingness to back up assertions of life-cycle cost savings with the data we all knew they had collected...), I made it a condition of employment with my new company that they'd provide me with a Mac and make sure their core business systems (e.g. web-based timecards) would be standards-conformant to support not just my Mac, but anyone who wanted to remain on Linux.
When something better comes along, I'll try it. But I'll point out I bought my first personal computer in Oct 1978, and I've tried just about everything except Windows 3, BoB and Windows ME. Pretty much consistently, at each point in time, the Apple offering was markedly better than the WinTel offering, enough to justify the price (and performance) differential. Linux systems have some significant price/performance advantages over Mac OS X (and certainly over WinTel), but not strong enough usability for the 90% of the stuff I spend my time doing (and that's the stuff that cost me the productivity hit on Windows.)
dave
"Mac" is the brand name of a product line (of computers) made by Apple. Products do not troll. Apple is a company, so if trolling is being done, it is Apple (or more specifically Apple Marketing) that is doing it. Choose your nouns carefully!
Apple's OS X v. Windows XP ads are hardly trolling. It is not trolling when a company compares their product line against their competitor's in a non-subjective way.
When I pull up the terminal window and type 'uptime' my Mac will return a date figure which is in months (and for a while there in years + months!) I have owned a PC running Windows XP and this was never the case. So memory fragmentation and frequency of rebooting are a legitimate comparison between the two platforms.
The iLife suite of applications, like iPhoto, iTunes, iEtc, is far better integrated, reliable and functional than any of the lifestyle applications that Microsoft bundles with Windows. So again, the point that Apple is making is legitimate. Just because you don't like the comparisons being drawn does not make the act of doing so flaming any more than my debate with you is flaming. Too often people call out others for flaming simply based on the fact that they don't like what the other party is saying.
This is not the case with Dvorak. I've been reading him since the late 80s/early 90s. While not being as overtly ridiculous a buffoon as someone like Bill O'Reilly, Dvorak's idea of "fair and balanced" is about as legitimate as that of Fox News. He often chooses which facts to include in a story to give it the slant he wants. He is consitently anti-Apple and makes little attempt to hide the fact. He reminds me of 60-Minutes' Andy Rooney or that idiot on ABC News, John Stossel. (Note: That bit about John Stossel was flaming. The man has the epistemological skills of a turnip and regularly makes an ass of himself on national television.)
The point isn't to hate Dvorak or harbor any emotion toward him whatsoever. The point is that he exists and has the right to voice his opinion, just like when skinheads march or Rupert Murdoch distorts the news. The only way to make people like them go away is to stop listening to them. How many times is a guy like Dvorak going to cry wolf (or inferior product) before people learn to roll their eyes at him? How many people in this country listen to writers like him because they're simply looking for someone they perceive to be in a position of authority (paid writer) to legitimize the things they already want to believe? It is not about facts, truth, or knowledge, it's all about spin.
Reporters are not supposed to troll, they are supposed to at least believe what they say is correct (even if it's not).
When John Dvorak writes his typical troll stories, potentially millions of people not familiar with the phenomenon John Dvorak take the article at face value and form opinion of people and products that affect their purchase choice and they also share the misinformation with other people.
Tell a lie enough times, and it stops being a lie in people's minds.
So are "Mac zealots" to be mocked about reacting strongly to lies spread in the media, or should the liears not exist in first place?
It's not so funny that media use misinformation just to drive ad impressions up. That's really low of them.
editing: "Tech pundit John Dvorak has long been known for his lame and baseless opinions."
... and generating traffic from Mac and PC users as vacuous as he is.
If Slashdot didn't occasionally regurgitate his vapor I wouldn't know that he was still around.
I forgot to sig
Here's the transcript of the video. Note that the audio is out of sync on the BitTorrent version too.
... there's a formula for pissing off Macintosh users and getting a lot of links or attention. And this has been deconstructed, but never accurately. I'm going to give you the deconstruction.
... which would piss them off even more.
...
---------
(Dvorak):
First, I write something that would be semi-innocuous, with just enough insulting stuff to get a lot of attention from the Macintosh community. So then they would write in -- and by the way, it would always be done in such a way that I had outs -- in other words, I would write in kind of a leisurely way. That would get me one column with a lot of numbers.
Then I'd get a lot of hate mail, and all kinds of weird Macintosh reaction. And then, I would react to it as though I was flabbergasted that everybody misterpreted me, and that they hated it, and I don't get it, and what's wrong with these people
So I'd get like huge hits
(Interviewer): So what was the point of all this?
(Dvorak): Now wait a minute. For numbers!
(Interviewer): Which numbers -- exactly, what numbers are you looking for?
(Dvorak): I get them. Believe me. Lots of numbers.
Now, then I let it simmer down for a while, and then whatever position I took originally, I would change the position exactly the opposite, and tell the Macintosh people I was completely wrong, and they were write all along, and the numbers would go through the ceiling!! Haha!
It was only about 20 years ago that Z-D tasked Dvorak with trolling Mac users as the inside back cover columnist for the old MacUser, where he openly admitted to writing things to inflame Mac users enough that they'd have to buy the magazine just to have reference for their 10-page crayon screeds to the editors against him. And if ancient history and paper is too hard, he has said what he said to Winer oon at least a half-dozen TWiT podcasts over the past year. This is not news, it is Dvorak stating an obvious truth for the umpteenth time. He is apparently still getting a chuckle from the fact that some people who take everything too seriously (e.g. Dave Winer) still don't get the joke after having it explained to them repeatedly over decades. If Winer really thinks this is some great revelation of sin, he's got his head further inserted than ever.
It is the job of anyone who writes for ad-supported media to attract eyeballs, and Dvorak has never been ashamed of doing that job. Being scandalized by his honesty says a lot more about the intelligence (or maybe integrity) of those who are scandalized than it says about Dvorak.
He mentions that in the first five seconds of the vid.
If Dvorak was a serial killer, he'd be the one that's caught because he's just so damn proud of his body of work and smug enough to want to get caught so that he could explain to the great unwashed masses how brilliant he really is (not that it would help, because there's only so much the great unwashed can comprehend...).
I wonder how many hits his site will get as people visit just to complain about the movie?
Clear, Dark Skies
Macs don't come with Dvorak keyboards.
People must not be rolling high enough to overcome his Tag Resistance.
Many PC makers bundle (or offer as a cheap option) Microsoft Works Suite, which includes Word 2002, Works (basic spreadsheet, database, calendar), Digital Image Standard (iPhoto), Encarta, Money, and Streets & Trips Essentials. Every PC sold with a DVD burner is bundled with DVD creation software (iDVD) and the vast majority are also bundled with movie-making software (iMovie). Whether or not the software bundled with a particular PC is comparable to iLife (or is better) depends on the PC.
I think I agree with the rest of your comment. I just think the new Apple ads are almost as misleading as Bill O'Reilly or Michael Moore.
TO START
PRESS ANY KEY
Where's the 'ANY' key? I see Esk, Kitarl, and Pig-Up...