Why you should take everything Mike Arrington says with a grain of salt.

I can understand someone posting an article then other people commenting on why they disagree, but to start a thread just to say "here's another reason I disagree"? I don't get it. Not only that, but saying one sentence (minor at that, in my opinion) discredits "quite a few other things" but not listing them? I don't know... there's a lot of useless stuff being posted on HN lately, but I don't waste my time (or other people's time) saying "this doesn't belong on HN" over and over and over. This just seems to cross a line though, so I felt the need to reply.<p>On top of that, what's with all the Arrington bashing lately? Some of his stuff is good and some is questionable. If you disagree with him, great, just put some meat into the argument. This just seems like you're going out of your way to post something negative. If you want to lay out your arguments for the "quite a few things", that could lead to an interesting thread, but I just don't get what you were expecting to achieve by posting this.

This isn't a good example of Arrington being off-target. His point that you can get a much better product for less money is well-supported in his article. How hard is it to use a point and shoot camera exclusively for video, if that's what someone wants to do? A crayon and paper are simple too.

This is typical Arrington:<p><i>So I haven’t actually tried out the new Flip Mino. But I’ve spoken with people who have, and I used the Flip Ultra, which launched late last year, for a while before abandoning it. And I just can’t figure out why people like this thing.</i><p>So you're reviewing something you've never used? <i>That's</i> credible.<p>I assume the people he's "spoken with" here are the same people he's spoken with about twitter being slow because of Rails. I'm starting to think that Arrington has a lot of "imaginary friends."

That is his opinion, and I doubt it would stop someone from buying the product. Mr Arrington bashed Ning on of his first reviews and said it was headed it to the Deadpool. Well, 560M dollars later, Ning prove that Mr Arrington opinion is just that. He can help you with a lot more traffic than your servers can handle, but he won't stop people from hitting BUY if they like it enough.

That's a pretty poor argument to support your thesis. There are plenty better ones out there, some of them straight from Arrington's mouth, i.e. he's basically said the key to techcrunch's success is that they don't have to go through the whole verification process that other media outlets do - in other words - take everything he says with a grain of salt.

I can handle him saying this...He is a features guy, he likes a lot of features.<p>I will begin to lose respect for him when a company he invest his money in goes on stage at TechCrunch 50.<p>I will definitely lose all respect for him if one of the start ups he invests in wins TechCrunch50. At some Point he needs to decide if he is his own PR firm or a third party commentator.

That's what discredits Arrington for you? How about the way he pimps the startups he invests in a la Seesmic video comments? All the same, I still read and enjoy his site.

To be fair, you should probably take everything anybody says with a grain of salt.