Horses**t
Last night I tweeted at John Gruber and MG Siegler: “What a load of horses**t. All due respect, but horses**t.” The tweet was in reference to a post on Daring Fireball citing MG's “review” of the Galaxy Nexus. Now, I won't take issue with his review overall.
Context & Ripple Effects
This is a flare-up in the long-running Apple-blog-versus-Android-hardware argument. John Gruber's Daring Fireball pointed to MG Siegler's take on the Galaxy Nexus, and Josh Topolsky — whose own outlet ran a Galaxy Nexus review last month — responded with a public tweet calling the coverage "horses**t." Siegler's parislemon blog immediately framed the story as "Josh Topolsky is mad," turning a review dispute into a named feud between two of the most-read voices in tech commentary.
Gruber has form here: his August 2011 "Balls" post was already part of a pattern of Daring Fireball picking fights with other outlets' coverage, stretching back to his 2007 public takedown of CNET. What changed is that the target is now a peer publication rather than a legacy newsroom, and the dispute plays out entirely in tweets and blog posts within hours.
First-order effects
- Topolsky and Gruber are now in an open, named conflict, with Siegler's parislemon amplifying the exchange — each camp's audience gets a fresh round of Apple-vs-Android framing around the same phone.
- MG Siegler's Galaxy Nexus review becomes the contested artifact itself: its credibility is now argued publicly rather than taken as one reviewer's verdict.
Second-order effects
- Readers of both sites are pushed to treat reviews as partisan signals rather than neutral assessments, raising the stakes for any outlet whose verdict on an Android flagship diverges from the Apple-commentary consensus.
- Other tech writers face pressure to declare a side or explicitly distance themselves from both camps, since staying silent in a visible feud reads as alignment.
Third-order effects
- If this pattern holds, tech criticism consolidates into identifiable camps with loyal audiences, where a review's reception depends less on the device tested than on which publication wrote it — eroding the shared baseline a review ecosystem needs.
The trend: Tech commentary is polarizing into personality-driven camps — Daring Fireball's Apple-centric circle versus generalist gadget outlets like The Verge — with reviews doubling as factional statements.