Let's suppose there is some ratio of Android victories to Android failures in the mind of the "typical user." I'll wave my hands at the exact measurement of that ratio -- it would probably be some product of the number of instances and the magnitude of each instance. But there is a ratio.
If a journalist covers mobile devices in a given category at a significant rate, I'd expect their stories on that category of device to have a similar positive-negative ratio as the actual wins the category has achieved. I wouldn't trust a guy who had 90% negative articles when the win rate in the eyes of a typical user is more like 50%. I also wouldn't trust someone who posted 99% about the losses when the typical user sees about 90% losses.
I don't have enough data on Gruber to know exactly how far off the mark he is, but I do know enough not to trust that he is anything like objective. Now, if his blog was titled, "Apple news and Android criticisms," fine. You can post 100% criticisms if that's the domain you're claiming to cover. But I've never seen such a disclaimer from Gruber so I can't give him a pass on that one either.
No, what I've done is express my view that one should not update one's thoughts about Android on the basis of what Gruber says, unless he says something positive. His negative views on Android phones or features provide nearly zero information, because he was going to say something negative or nothing at all whether or not the news represents an improvement.
Put another way, I'll admit I can't tell you exactly how many positive articles Gruber should have written by now. I could probably calculate that number if I cared enough, but I don't. What I can tell you is that he is well south of where he should be on this topic, IF he cares about providing me with information with which I can update my beliefs about the quality of Android OS.
I think you've missed the point. I'm not disagreeing with your desire to not read what he writes. I'm saying that your claim to be able to objectively quantify that in a way independent of your own opinions is empty. You're just taking the abstract notion of objectivity and replacing it with unknown quantities. You're trying to elevate your existing opinion to the status of a statistical inference without having to show your work. I think that's deeply mistaken and moreover unnecessary. Your opinion is fine as it is. Everyone's is. But it's not a fact.
Of course, everyone's views on Android are different. While I may have some threshold for the number of positive articles that would be necessary for Gruber's writing to be useful, someone else may have some other threshold depending on their priors. For me, the threshold is quite low because I do not like Android at all, and Gruber falls short of even that low bar. I don't think there are many who can make significant updates based on Gruber's work, since P(negative review of Android feature) is nearly 100%, even for features most people consider good.
In other words, Gruber's writing is entertainment, not evidence. The post you were originally commenting on, as I read it, was based on the assumption that Gruber's writing ought to aspire to be evidence, and thus lamenting the fact that it's not useful for most people. Personally I don't believe in the idea of "ought," but I think that asking for a quota is a sort of intentional missing of the point that the previous person was trying to make.
Who is talking about quotas? ICS has revolutionized Android, but you wouldn't know it from reading DF. That's already a failure by Gruber, as a tech journalist.
I'm confused by what you're saying. You claim to not be talking about quotas, but cite not covering the fact[1] that "ICS has revolutionized Android" as a failure. If he had covered it, that would be better, correct? So evidently there is some level of positive Android coverage he's required to do before he's allowed to say what he actually thinks and link to what he actually wants to link to. If that's not a quota, what would you call it?
[1] Here I get absolutely bewildered by what you're saying, given that the first device with ICS was released today, and I know this precisely because I read it on Daring Fireball yesterday, wherein Gruber writes: "I spent a few minutes playing with Topolsky’s Galaxy Nexus in the On The Verge green room; some of the text editing improvements in Android 4.0 alone make it quite obviously the best Android phone in the world".
Yeah, but it's always couched in some sort of snark. Yesterday, he posted something offhand about wondering how many people were going to line up for the Nexus release, clearly worded in a way intended to mean "we all know it will be none". So today, people sent him images of lines outside a Verizon store, and his one line reply (http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/12/15/galaxy-nexus) was, "Quite chivalrous of them to let all the women in first", which again, is intended to be read as, "look at all the nerdy guys".
Now do a google image search for "iPhone 4S lines" -- just pick the first few hits (here's the first one: http://www.iphonehacks.com/2011/10/iphone-4s-lines.html) -- and count the ratio of men and women. I'll save you the trouble and tell you up front there are a lot of men in those lines. But Gruber literally wouldn't think of commenting on that, because to him, people line up for the iPhone because it's wonderful, and they line for an Android phone because they're abnormal in some way, and that's simply how he processes the information. Whether or not its a conscious strategy is mostly irrelevant to me as the reader: if my choices are dishonest or incompetent, I'm going to look elsewhere. Which is a shame because he's a good writer.
Gruber is not a general "tech journalist", he's an apple centric blogger.
Two of his main themes are that the following bits of conventional wisdom (which you can get on any of dozens of "tech journalist" websites) are incorrect:
(1) Android is winning.
(2) Android is as good as iOS (or better or nearly as good).
Serious question: are those points conventional wisdom? Aside from Engadget reviews or whatever. I'm biased, as I actually get a decent amount of my tech news from DF.
I've read DF enough to know that Gruber points out small Apple missteps far more often than he points out Android victories (often; never).