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Infographs are Ruining the Internet
- billturner 16y agoPoor spelling doesn't help much either.
- revolvingcur 16y agoI will never understand how someone can spend hours on a piece like this without reading it once to check for basic grammatical errors.
- mortice 16y agoThe point of the piece doesn't seem to be to add anything of value to a debate, rather than to grab some easy traffic and make a joke. Whether it succeeds at the latter is up for debate, of course, but given the aims, who cares about the grammar?
- lessallan 16y agoWe should certainly proof the article better, but it was an experiment. We paid $150 for the graphic, it was done and an overseas fellow in a couple of weeks. I sent him three emails so the overall work was about 15 minutes and cost 150 dollars.
- mortice 16y agoFair enough - I clearly missed the point. :)
- steveklabnik 16y agoThat's why it's so funny: that's exactly what infographics do. This post is textbook satire. EDIT: see my sibling for proof.
- samdk 16y agoI'm pretty sure that was intentional (or, at least, part of the joke), since there's this text right above it: Also you can get your own infograph done for about $150 bucks from "derri_hasmi at yahoo.co.id", although proof reading the infograph before you publish is recommended.
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- dasil003 16y agoPreviously ruined: USA Today
- nollidge 16y agoI don't get it. Is a collection of made-up facts supposed to constitute satire or something? > Infographs are usually very pretty, but it's really a gimmick, they're not useful content, it's link bait to get traffic to a blog. Why so cynical? God forbid somebody represent data in an aesthetically pleasing manner. If infographics are a gimmick, then so is anything anybody ever does to make their creations interesting to read/view/use.
- steveklabnik 16y ago> Why so cynical? Well, infographics are often drummed up for SEO reasons. You simply take advantage of the fact that people hotlink 99% of the time, and all it takes is one controversial or popular infographic to get approximately 1MM backlinks.
- tomlin 16y agoBut wouldn't there be some detriment to the content being a graphic? ALT attr won't convey, either.
- JoelSutherland 16y agoThis image is nearly definition satire. So yes, it does constitute satire. It should be clear that the complaint here is about the explosion of "infographics" that are at best a shallow aesthetic improvement, at worst a migration of text into an senselessly organized image.
- samdk 16y agoThe problem is not that infographics are aesthetically pleasing. The term "infographic" has come to be represented with low-content, high-flashiness presentations of data. (There are many good graphics that also convey information. "Infographics" generally do a bad job of the latter.) Since they're pretty and usually not completely content-less (bad infographics are a great way to spread very few facts over a very large area), they often get a lot of hits on social news sites like Reddit, Digg, and even, sometimes, HN. Because of this, they've become a favorite tool of people trying to do SEO to take advantage of that traffic.
- albemuth 16y agoI wonder for how long derri_hasmi pondered if he should take the $150 at the risk of getting less work in the future.
- lessallan 16y agoI don't think our little blog will stop anyone from making infographs.
- jokermatt999 16y agoMeh. It's satire, and it does have somewhat of a point, but I feel like it's even more shallow than what it's parodying. It captures the feel of a bad infographic post well, but it does it to the point where I feel like it undermines their own purpose. With apologies to Bill Hicks: Ahh, I see what they're doing there. They're going for the shallow infographic satirizing shallow infographics market. Big market there.
- lou1492 16y agoThey are also ruining our youth! Infographs encourage our lazy society to become even more dependent on graphical stimulation and less competent in reading the printed word. I believe the first infographic was developed in Nazi Germany and illustrated SS soldiers goose stepping.
- merraksh 16y agoA bad (IMHO) example of infographic: http://images.fastcompany.com/upload/Typefaces-of-the-world_new_large.jpg http://images.fastcompany.com/upload/Typefaces-of-the-world_... Stylish, but hardly readable and not very informative.
- virginiadixon 16y agoWOW! I found only one error. How many were there?