Lying with pictures: Smartphone manufacturer share by OS • Hacker News Board

Re: Lying with pictures: Smartphone manufacturer share by OS

#71

Post by wpietri » Mon, Jul 16, 2012, 1:36 PM UTC

damoncali wrote: post #49

wpietri wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first is a "it's not a lie because we explain it in the small print" argument. Technically true but practically false. The latter is just a bare assertion. Got proof? I'd bet not. Which is why you had to say "far, far", hoping that people would just go along with you. Personally, I'd think that Nielsen's business is to make sure their customers know what's going on. That's not an argument for running the second g…

Personally, I'd think that Nielsen's business is to make sure their customers know what's going on. In my experience, that is not the case. The information they provide is generally used by middle managers in large companies in internal powerpoint decks with the intent of waging intra-company warfare. The use of the the info is highly political and opinionated, not rational and academic. So, yeah, it would be preferr…

Note that you've gone from "far, far better for their customers' needs" to "just as good for their (pointless) purposes" but cheaper. Which is a much weaker argument.

I also think your "nobody cares about the data" argument is weak. But I suspect you know that already, and were just trying to argue your way out of a hole so I won't belabor it.

Re: Lying with pictures: Smartphone manufacturer share by OS

#72

Post by Foomandoonian » Mon, Jul 16, 2012, 2:53 PM UTC

janardanyri wrote: post #69

Foomandoonian wrote: post #66

This story used to be called 'Why is Nielsen misrepresenting smartphone market share?' I thought that was a brilliant headline, and it made me jump into the conversation here. I doubt the new title, 'Lying with pictures: Smartphone manufacturer share by OS', would have caught my eye. Why do the titles on HN keep getting neutered?

Headline cleverness is a zero sum game. I'd rather have drier titles instead of a psychological hacking competition, and scan for content quality (as loosely indicated by upvotes) and subject relevancy.

Hm, one of us doesn't have a good grasp of what 'zero-sum game' means. In truth, it may be me, because you lost me there.

I wasn't praising the headline because it was 'clever' though. I think the question it raised highlighted a bigger issue that still hasn't really been examined. People are focusing on the importance (or not) of accurate charts. I'm more interested in understanding why a company that exists to provide a 'complete understanding of what consumers watch and buy' is misrepresenting data.

Re: Lying with pictures: Smartphone manufacturer share by OS

#73

Post by Foomandoonian » Mon, Jul 16, 2012, 2:54 PM UTC

Foomandoonian wrote: post #19

I found it odd that there were no comments on the original Nielsen blog post — http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/?p=32494 — so I left one politely pointing out the inaccuracies. It's being held in moderation. I doubt it'll ever see the light.

24 hours later, and I think it's pretty clear that Nielsen aren't accepting any comments on that article.

Re: Lying with pictures: Smartphone manufacturer share by OS

#74

Post by aneth4 » Tue, Jul 17, 2012, 3:46 AM UTC

Terretta wrote: post #39

aneth4 wrote: post #33

This is just generally a horrible way to make a chart that is intended to communicate relative size - it's worse than a pie chart because visually it's much harder to compare sizes of horizontal and vertical rectangles. To compound that by appearing to have proportional sizes, but being completely wrong, is humorously incompetent. Reminds me of those joke maps showing NYC as dominating the US.

> it's worse than a pie chart because visually it's much harder to compare sizes of horizontal and vertical rectangles Research I've seen suggests the exact opposite -- that people are great at estimating area of rectangles, and terrible at estimating area of circular or triangular shapes. They know which circle is bigger, but don't have any idea by how much bigger. That said, pie chart slices work for simple data no…

> Research I've seen suggests the exact opposite

I'm not suggesting circles of different sizes instead of rectangles, which is what this study is about. While interesting, it's not relevant to my statement.

> That said, pie chart slices work for simple data not because of area, but because all you have to compare is the simple length of the circumference segments. That's a single dimension, and easy to compare.

Big whatever to taht. It's easier to compare a pie chart than rectangles of varying orientations, which is my point. I don't really care if it's because it's a linear measurement vs an area derived from a linear measurement. Let's be pedantic, shall we?

Re: Lying with pictures: Smartphone manufacturer share by OS

#75

Post by Foomandoonian » Sat, Jul 21, 2012, 8:43 PM UTC

Foomandoonian wrote: post #73

Foomandoonian wrote: post #19

I found it odd that there were no comments on the original Nielsen blog post — http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/?p=32494 — so I left one politely pointing out the inaccuracies. It's being held in moderation. I doubt it'll ever see the light.

24 hours later, and I think it's pretty clear that Nielsen aren't accepting any comments on that article.

To my surprise, Nielsen have (after a delay) published all comments AND fixed the graphic.

> Update 7/16: The original graphic in this post included a chart depicting U.S. smartphone manufacturer share which did not scale proportionately. While all data points in the original post and graphic remain accurate, the post has since been updated with a correctly scaled image.