Linking to bullshit
The industry of writing inflammatory bullshit about Apple is booming.
It’s booming partially because writing inflammatory Apple headlines gets a lot of clicks. Apple is popular and the dominant player in many industries, so anything that attacks it will attract attention.
But it’s also booming because we all keep linking to the bullshit. We, Apple-and-related writers, link to it from our blogs or Twitter accounts. We point and laugh at the most humorously wrong sentence, or we rebut its points one by one.
We think we’re taking them down, but we’re just taking the bait. And then all of our readers and followers take the bait, and we support the bullshit by sending pageviews.
I enjoy an occasional humorous takedown of one of these by the people who do it best: John Gruber and The Macalope. But even they sometimes do it more than they need to (although it’s The Macalope’s job), and we don’t all need to pile on.
If you truly dislike bullshit writing and don’t want to support it, hit the publishers where it hurts: don’t read it, and don’t link to it.