Comment by rgovostes
2 months ago
One of the Forbes "contributors", Gordon Kelly, used to generate an enormous volume of posts for every single minor Apple software release, in addition to regurgitating every rumor published by Mark Gurman and other journalists.
Apparently he passed away last year, after "authoring 2,511 articles in sum and accumulating over 174 million page views in just one year, 33 million of which were gained within a single month."
https://www.forbes.com/sites/paulmonckton/2023/10/05/tribute...
Apple-focused journalists have historically been especially egregious. Nilay Patel and Josh Topolsky took their maddening approach of covering the Engadget homepage in inane, separate articles for every minute detail of a product announcement (starting with the iPad) to The Verge, and its "success" caused the strategy to propagate onward. No more concise write-ups; it's all about keeping you in a deathloop on the platform. Gotta milk those cult clicks, you know.
Certain topics, and Apple is certainly one of them, can be essentially guaranteed to generate a ton of traffic. HN is by no means immune. And some writers have made a career of taking advantage of that fact.
Meanwhile, a founder of one of the major 80s-era minicomputer companies that even had a book written about them passed away a few weeks ago and I would have not even known except for my Facebook groups.
What person do you have in mind?
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