[onion2k]

Yes, some people are privacy conscious and are going to stop using Fitbit but how many are actually doing it? A lot? A few?

There's nothing wrong with reporting that a small number of people are publicly announcing that they're binning their Fitbit devices. They are, and they weren't before, so that's news. Are you suggesting there should be threshold an event should have to pass before it becomes newsworthy? Who would decide what that threshold is?

[thecatspaw]

Yes, there should be a threshold. Otherwise the newspaper is gonna be full of articles which are not interesting at all to the general population.

[onion2k]

There should be editorial judgement about whether or not something is worth publishing. That is not, and shouldn't be, a quantitative threshold.

[degenerate]

That editorial judgement is exactly why most articles with no actual content are published in the first place - "We need to beef up this headline so it reaches more people"

Correct headline would have been "A handful of Fitbit users are..." but it wouldn't get clicks. The editors are to blame most of the time for doing a disservice to their readers.

[iudqnolq]

That's essentially what the article title ("some fitbit users") said before OP truncated it.

Credit https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21573658

[yabadabadoes]

So given that in most cases only the company has access to numbers and any multi-product company can choose not to reveal break down statistics.. I guess it's only positive pieces from now on?

Google is free to release positive spin articles and try to provide numbers to fit that. I don't think they will hesitate to provide more stats than we otherwise would have seen unless it is so grim that they have no way to frame it.

[diffeomorphism]

An editorial judgement however absolutely should take quantities into account.

What were discussing here is whether the editor's judgement was poor and not whether there is some magical, exact "this is newsworthy" criterion.

[knzhou]

There already is. In tech reporting, the criterion whether it can be fit into the pre-existing narrative of Big Tech being evil. There are similar numbers of people thanking Google for new features every day, but you won't hear about that.

[JohnFen]

> narrative of Big Tech being evil.

Big Tech could stop that narrative by ceasing to do awful things.

[mistermann]

> There's nothing wrong with reporting that a small number of people are publicly announcing that they're binning their Fitbit devices.

This specific incident is surely rather harmless, but I wonder if the same can be said about this type of thing.

>> ...but how many are actually doing it? A lot? A few? Who knows. I'm sure <X> has no clue but that won't stop them from writing <Y>.

I feel like it would be improvement if individuals and overall society (especially thoughts leaders) considered the potential importance of this general idea. I have a speculative armchair theory that the incredible changes in the amount and style of information (news, memes, forum discussions) people consume due to the introduction of the internet and 24 hour cable news is doing something to humans on a deep psychological basis, that it may be significantly altering our heuristics in a historically abnormal way, resulting in a large amount of incorrect perceptions and negative behaviors.

Is this really happening, might there be some truth to this, could some people be truly affected by this? A lot? A few? Who knows. But if it is happening, to a degree that is non-negligible, and nobody notices, how damaging might the effects be? Could this, say, affect how people treat others on a daily basis? Might it play a role in how they vote in elections, or make personal decisions on various public policy matters? To me, these seem like questions worth considering.

[knzhou]

A threshold is a good thing, because if you can be entirely selective in your reporting, then you can convince people of any narrative you want. This is the Chinese robber fallacy [0].

0: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/16/cardiologists-and-chin...