How a boring 14-second video started Hissgate

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iphone 7
This is what it feels like for a story to blow up.
Photo: Apple

Remember Hissgate, the short-lived (but, for a few days, massive) story about how some iPhone 7 Plus owners were experiencing strange hissing sounds when their handsets were performing processor-intensive tasks?

Well, the guy who first reported it has written a blog post about his experience after the video blew up on YouTube, racking up more than 1 million hits. And it actually makes pretty interesting reading.

512 Pixels blogger Stephen Hackett noticed the Hissgate problem early on in his iPhone 7 Plus ownership. He decided to put up a short video on YouTube recording the sound — and quickly found himself sitting on top of a viral hit, being picked up by various blogs and even appearing on international TV news.

Now that the story has died down, he writes that:

“I’m glad it is over. It’s not because I am afraid it damaged Apple’s brand, or my relationship with Apple. My job is to report on my experiences using its products and living in its ecosystem, and that may put me — and many others — at odds with the company from time to time.

While it was wild to see that view counter climb so high, it came with a price. Seeing the replies from people who just wanted to jab at me and reading articles that took my honest accounting of what happened and twisting it to defend Apple at my expense was hurtful.

The whole thing was just … exhausting. I’m happy it’s already out of the news cycle. I don’t regret reporting my experience, but had I known things were going to get so far out of hand, I’m not sure I would have done it.”

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Ultimately it’s an interesting post as much because of what it says about the way news is disseminated online as anything else. It’s about what it feels like for a story to go viral (and one that was never intended to do so), and about the way in which one person’s experience can be extrapolated outward by journalists looking for clicks.

It’s about the whole “if it bleeds it leads” approach to how news is shared online.

It’s something I’ve thought about quite a lot while covering Apple news. Most of us reading this are Apple fans (with possibly a few hate readers thrown in their for good measure!), and while I wouldn’t like to go back to the pre-internet days of scouring monthly Apple magazines for news, the way isolated incident stories like this spread is definitely a downside of the way news is shared online.

With that said, any bets on what next year’s “gate” prefix will be?

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