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>The only argument against MKBHD could be the YouTube title he chose. I clicked through to that Vassallo guy's twitter and that is exactly the argument he is m
by slg 3y ago
>The only argument against MKBHD could be the YouTube title he chose.
I clicked through to that Vassallo guy's twitter and that is exactly the argument he is making. He isn't defending the product, which he admitted he has never actually used. He isn't defending the company. He isn't even arguing against a single thing said in the body of the video. He is solely objecting to the title for being "sensationalized" as if it is impossible this product is the worst one MKBHD has ever reviewed. It is fundamentally, to use Vassallo's own words, a "distasteful, almost unethical" argument to make because it is attacking someone's character rather than a product that seemingly everyone agrees is at best half-baked.
- philwelch 3y agoClickbait titles are part of the medium of YouTube and any regular user will recognize it as such. And frankly, having watched the review, I can easily believe this is literally the worst product he’s ever reviewed; it’s a product that costs as much as a smartphone that does a tiny subset of what any smartphone already does, extremely poorly. But let’s talk about the clickbait. The full title of the video is, “The Worst Product I Have Ever Reviewed…For Now”. If it was just “The Worst Product I Have Ever Reviewed”, that would be a perfectly fair summary—maybe a little clickbaity, though it doesn’t seem like MKBHD’s style to go on a rant and completely tear a product apart for the amusement of the audience, and that’s not what he does in the video, either. The “…For Now” vaguely implies that maybe, somehow, in the future, it will improve to the point where it is no longer quite so terrible, and there is some sort of hidden nuance to the otherwise strident tone of the first part of the title, that maybe there is some hope of the product one day, in the future, having some redeeming quality perhaps delivered via OTA update. You don’t know! It’s a mystery! And that mystery—the hope that maybe this piece of junk isn’t totally pointless after all—that’s the clickbait. You want to know what he means by “for now”! The most sensational, clickbaity part of the video title isn’t the negative part, but instead the part that implies the product might be of any value!
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Intralexical 3y agoIkr? I'm more inclined to agree with this ellipsized note in the fine article: > Actually, the deference Brownlee gave the vision and the potential of future upgrades was arguably generous But of course, pointing that out would be a red herring, because I don't believe the original tweet was made in good faith in the first place. Vassallo sounds like the sort who would be satisfied only if nobody is allowed to criticize something he likes (and ideally if at some point you click through and pay money for his… Influencer newsletter? Idfk).
- wpietri 3y agoThat's a pretty bizarre take on Vassallo's part. I have no idea what kind of ethics he's thinking of. Or whose character is being attacked. And even wilder to me was this bit: "If a single person can affect the stock price of a company, we usually restrict what they can say or when. MK should be cognizant of the unconstrained power he has (for now)." That's just wildly untrue. For example, John Carreyrou absolutely destroyed Theranos. Nobody restricts what he says in the sense Vassallo appears to mean here. Indeed, the Wall Street Journal is successful as a business precisely because their journalists see getting the truth to their readers as core to their jobs.
- CooCooCaCha 3y agoSorry but that’s bs. The title of the video is “The worst product I’ve ever reviewed… for now”. That is not a personal attack on someone’s character. And it leaves the door open for the product to improve in the future, which he also suggests in the video. The worst you can say is that it’s clickbait-y but mkbhd doesn’t usually use such extreme titles.
- wes-ton 3y agoI think you misread. slg was saying that that the Twitter user was attacking MKBHD's character, not that MKBHD was somehow attacking the product's character.
- CooCooCaCha 3y agoIs that true? From the parent comment: “it is attacking someone's character rather than a product”. The twitter guy is saying mkbhd is attacking the creator of the product’s character.
- slg 3y agoYou have the wrong read of what I said. To summarize the situation: MKBHD: This is "The Worst Product I Have Ever Reviewed…For Now". Vassallo: It is "distasteful, almost unethical" to criticize a product like that. Me: No, the way Vassallo challenged MKBHD's character is "distasteful, almost unethical".
- Intralexical 3y agoYeah, that's what I personally got on my second reading of your comment. Though I did skim the first time. The transition from explaining Vassallo's argument to explaining the problem with Vassallo's argument is a bit abrupt. It's not immediately clear whether you're referring to Vassallo or MKBHD at that point. I think maybe a line break around "It is fundamentally", or switching the pronoun to a proper noun, might help it parse better. Overall I liked the way you worded it.
- 3y ago
- kstrauser 3y agoMKBHD has a finite and countable number of reviews. One of them has to be the worst. Even if this wasn't the worst product he ever reviewed, so what? He wasn't saying it's the worst product in the history of products, or that it ran over his dog and spread lies about his sister. "The worst product I ever reviewed", even for MKBHD, is drawing from a pretty small set. Big deal, Humane. Take your lumps, fix the criticisms, and move on.
- throwawaymaths 3y agoIt's actually a rather large set. But it's entirely believable that it's the worst product he's reviewed to date.
- addandsubtract 3y agoI think he said this a while back, in one of the smartphone EOY videos, that while he tests a lot of products, he only reviews a few of them. He also a video about the worst car he reviewed recently, which somehow didn't get the same negative feedback.
- SpecialistK 3y agoI watched the review and then saw the tweet (or a response to it) later in the day. The main takeaway I had was "who the hell is this guy telling Marques what he can or cannot think about this product?" The video was not a bait-and-switch. He was generous with criticism but fair in describing how it was supposed to work and what he wanted from it. So for this random Tweeter to suggest that Marques was being either dishonest in his "unofficial mental ranking (the worst)" or should have been dishonest in minimizing his critique is so patronizing and itself dishonest.
- DVassallo 3y agoI wasn’t telling Marques anything. I was having a discussion with my audience.
- DVassallo 3y agoFinally someone with good reading comprehension. Thank you.
- slg 3y agoMaybe check your own reading comprehension levels. I was criticizing you.