
Haters Gonna Hate: The Argument Against Fanboys - TBloom
http://blog.travisbloom.me/post/7435495743
======
jrockway
What I don't understand about fanbois is how most of them have no skin in the
game. It's OK to argue passionately about the merits of iOS if you designed
and implemented it. It's a little weird when all you've done is paid $599 for
a phone that uses it.

Define yourself by what you do, not what you've bought.

~~~
mechanical_fish
In what sense does a person who has just paid an engineer $599 for something
"have no skin in the game"? Seems to me they have just anted up $599 worth of
skin. Indeed, unless they return their new phone within a short period or the
thing breaks under warranty, they're holding the bag. If they decide three
months later that the phone sucks, it's not the engineer that feels sad. The
engineer has made a profit.

There's an old saying about paying, pipers, and tunes that seems appropriate
here.

~~~
jrockway
Let's say the average iPhone user makes $100,000 a year. That means the $599
iPhone is about 0.599% of that person's income. If they work 40 hours a week,
out of a total of 168 hours in a week, that means they spent 0.143% of their
year working to get the phone. But the person who designed the phone spent
100% of their working _on_ the phone.

So the average user spent less time on the phone, and they didn't design the
phone, they just gave AT&T a tiny bit of their money once a month.

~~~
dasil003
Your analysis is silly. The iPhone is a status symbol, just like a BMW or Grey
Goose. There are going to always be dumbasses identifying personally with
these things in a vain search for self-esteem. In reality these people are a
tiny minority with an age distribution skewing well under the age of full
frontal-lobe development, but they make enough noise in forums that you'd
think the fate of the world hinges on this bullshit.

~~~
Jach
Where you're wrong is in assuming this affliction is only with dumb people or
a minority. We're status-seeking creatures, it affects us all. Of course to
degrees, but it's not as if educated techies don't get into pointless flame
wars all the time.

jrockway: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases>

~~~
dasil003
Dumbass doesn't necessarily mean dumb. Lord knows i've participated in my fair
share of flame wars, but I've grown more resistant to it as I've aged.

------
neutronicus
Can we purge the word "fanboy" from our collective lexicon?

I don't think I've seen a single discussion enriched by its use. It's just a
catch-all insult, like the "fag" of the twenty-first-century tech scene.

(Don't even get me started on "fanboi")

~~~
makmanalp
Really? To me it pretty plainly sounds like a term reserved for people who are
dogmatic adorers. Zealots if you will. That's a very specific meaning, and not
catch-all at all.

~~~
InclinedPlane
Use the term zealot then, or something even milder (like "supporter"). The
problem with a term like fanboy in a serious discussion is that it is heavily
derogatory, and derogatory terms typically shut down debate.

~~~
Jach
Typically whenever people start throwing insults around, the debate has
already shut down and people are just scoring points from the audience. The
use of the zealot/fanboy insult is just to point that out to the audience in
case they missed it, since someone can still be completely polite yet still a
fanboy unwilling or unable to spout anything but their own set of talking
points. So shutting down a discussion isn't necessarily due to the person who
cast the first insult, and sometimes there wasn't one to start with.

It's the people who insist on being polite that you have to watch out for; you
can be a lot meaner, with polite speech, than with derogatory speech.

------
Yhippa
I feel that gadgets can be a proxy for people to feel superior to each other
like with cars, sports teams, and purses. I don't know what people hope to get
out of arguing about it other than entertainment perhaps.

~~~
cageface
Skillful marketing encourages people to define themselves by the things they
buy. Apple in particular is very good at this.

~~~
GHFigs
How does Apple encourage people to define themselves by the things they buy?

~~~
cageface
The "I'm a Mac" ads are probably the most glaringly obvious case. The iPod
dancer ads are another example of marketing that revolves around selling an
image and lifestyle. Everybody does this kind of thing, Apple just does it
better than most.

