5 ms·

Paid? By Apple? Or just his feed sponsorships and Deck ads?

• hristov 16y ago
  By Apple of course.
  • deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
  • ugh 16y ago
    That’s a rather serious accusation. Do you have any evidence which would point you that way?
    • ergo98 16y ago
      A less serious accusation is that Gruber now knows that his core readership consists of, essentially, the Apple faithful. He knows to pander to that crowd and that is how he gets paid. It's iPhone fans who feel that every Gruber observation about the iPhone is so critically important that it needs to be voted up on HN.
      • deleted 16y ago
        [deleted]
        • ergo98 16y ago
          I != the other person. It was a simple, obvious observation. In the same way that a writer for the right wing press isn't going to suddenly question conservative values.
          • ugh 16y ago
            My bad. My memory is really failing me.
          • allwein 16y ago
            The grammar nerd in me is desperately wishing that you had written this as "The other person != me".
      • jacobolus 16y ago
        His readership, from the frequency with which his posts make it to the front page here, seems to include the hacker news community. Do you consider yourself, or the rest of us, “essentially the Apple faithful”? As far as I can tell the subject of his blog could be summarized as something like “high signal-to-noise and semi-technical discussion of Apple, the web, and graphic design, with occasional sports and politics related tidbits. “The Apple faithful” as a group is quite different from “technical and semi-technical readers interested in Apple and the web”.
        • ergo98 16y ago
          >Do you consider yourself, or the rest of us, “essentially the Apple faithful”? HN does have a strong Apple lean, although it has subsided quite dramatically over the past year (for reasons that PG has documented).
      • deleted 16y ago
        [deleted]
      • ZeroGravitas 16y ago
        A few people have claimed round here that paying attention solely to metrics can push you in strange directions e.g. Google ending up with inconsistent designs that annoy aesthetes because their stats show that people "prefer" them in some measurable manner. I think it's quite likely that by paying even subliminal attention to his traffic stats Gruber has turned into the anti-Dvorak, someone who makes inflammatory and (crucially) factually incorrect statements about tech rivals because that is exactly the kind of thing that riles up nerds. Just being wrong or acting superior isn't enough, you have to really press people's buttons to troll effectively. (Dvorak's a bit old-school so for those who aren't aware, he's a tech journalist that made a career out of trolling Apple fans and later admitted to doing exactly that because it drove page-views.)