From the Editor’s Desk: Bad Advice (Premium)

Like many of you, I use a read-later service to put aside articles, blog posts, and other web pages so I can reference them later. I’m currently using Instapaper after several years with Pocket, but there’s nothing wrong with the latter per se. It’s just that I use so many different PCs and devices that constantly having to re-sign in using a Mozilla account and its weird requirements is so tedious. Regardless of the service, I use this sort of thing for all kinds of reasons, both personal and work-related. I will often use it to read longer articles that are of interest to me in a distraction-free way, of course. But it’s also handy for news or other in-the-moment information that I need for my writing.

As part of a series of experiments related to local accounts and seeing whether particular Windows 11 configurations would or would not alleviate some enshittification, especially that related to OneDrive Folder backup and Microsoft Office harassment, I opened Widgets and saw a headline that seemed curiously familiar and yet was only recently published. So I clicked on it, like an idiot, and it opened the article in Microsoft Edge, because of the aforementioned enshittification we all deal with in Windows 11. So I saved it to Instapaper and closed Edge as quickly as possible.

And then I forgot about it. This has been a busy month, and yesterday was a busy day, as Wednesdays always are, thanks to Windows Weekly carving three hours right out of the middle of it (or more, if you add in the time it takes to write the show notes). But Thursday is a new day. And this morning, I got up at 7 am, giving me about 45 minutes before I had to be on-camera for First Ring Daily, and so I drank some coffee and read the news. This isn’t always the case, but it went quickly this morning, and so I opened Instapaper after I finished with the news apps I start each day with.

And then I saw the article I had saved. Yes. This was familiar. Seeing the headline again–“I asked a pro photographer for the best iPhone camera settings — my pics are now better than yours,” which is absolutely terrible–I thought back, and I figured I had come across it as long as months ago. And I had this vague memory that the advice it offered wasn’t just bad, but dangerously and stupidly bad. I was curious. So I clicked it. Or tapped it, I guess, this was on my iPad. And this is what I saw.

In case it’s not clear, there’s nothing to read. In the multi-tiered hell that is the modern Internet, this web article was originally published on some website, it was picked up by Microsoft’s network of terrible news sources and regurgitated in a new format on its various feeds (MSN on the web, formerly Start, and the Discover feed in Widgets), and then it was further extruded into Instapaper, by me, where all the content was lost.

This happens sometimes. So Instapaper offers an option to read the original article. Which you can find here.

Here, I learned a few things.

The article is from Mashable. It was written by someone named Kimberly Gedeon, who I immediately suspected of being a college intern or similar. It was first published (at least on MSN) two weeks ago. It’s not very long, given the “2 minute read” note at the top. And it seems to have had a lot of engagement: 69 people liked this article (on MSN), and there are 19 comments (ditto). Hm.

(What I didn’t learn: MSN–formerly Start, but whatever–is complete garbage. That I’ve known for a long time.)

So I started reading it. Yep, I’d read it before. Which is weird, given that it allegedly first appeared two weeks ago and my memory of it is from longer ago. But it specifically mentions the iPhone 16 Pro Max, which is brand new. Hm.

And then it gets weird. Under the first and only sub-heading, “Best iPhone camera settings, according to an expert,” it reads:

“So how do you get the crème de la crème of photo quality out of your iPhone? Follow these steps — and thank our pro photographer Maldonado later.”

And then it just ends. There are no steps.

What there is, instead, is a “related” video (about hidden features in iOS 15, which is from three years ago), a “More for you” section with links to related iPhone content and 100 percent unrelated news content, plus ads–this is MSN, after all–and then … another article. This one from TechRadar about the iPhone 16 Camera Control. And then “More for you” followed by yet another Apple-related article. It may go on like this to infinity, I stopped looking.

What I did look at, however, was the comments. You will recall there are 19 of them. Several of which mention that the list of steps is missing. It boggles the mind that 69 people–69!!!–liked this article, given that it does not contain the content promised by its terrible headline. Incredible. Did they even read it? Any of them?

MSN doesn’t link to the original article, of course. Its goal is to keep you on MSN, where you can be bombarded by Microsoft’s advertising and tracking. And so I Googled the headline to find the original Mashable post. What I received is interesting.

The top result, the one with the headline from MSN, is from the Southeast Asia edition of Mashable. The original, from the US, has a different and slightly less clickbaity headline in the search results: “Best iPhone camera settings, according to an expert.” But when I clicked on that link, the (US) Mashable site displayed the same terrible headline: “I asked a pro photographer for the best iPhone camera settings — my pics are now better than yours.” A small win for consistency and a major victory for terribleness.

You can see the article for yourself here. This one does include the steps that the MSN partial regurgitation does not. But please, dear God, do not follow the advice in this article.

What it recommends is terrible and inappropriate for typical iPhone users. Basically, that you turn on all the Pro controls and use ProRaw Max and the JPEG-XL Lossy ProRaw format, something no normal consumer should do. That configuration is literally for professional photographers and the resulting files are broadly incompatible and humongous, about three times the size of JPEGs at the same resolution. This is terrible, terrible advice.

And that’s what my world is full of. People who do what I do, from a high level. Who have no idea what they’re talking about. Spreading nonsense to the world like a virus. And then sleeping soundly at night, unaware of the harm they cause.

And I hate it. I hate it as much as I hate the terrible headlines and writing I see from blogs like Neowin that can only afford the most horrible, inexperienced, and inexpensive writers imaginable and then spend their days wasting readers’ time with poorly written nonsense about nothing. But “nothing” isn’t dangerous, at least, it’s just dumb. What Kimberly recommends in that post is dangerous. And stupid.

And that is worse. So much worse.

If you bothered to read From the Editor’s Desk: Slog (Premium) yesterday and really thought about the frustration I was trying to express, you could summarize it, simply, as me trying hard, every single day, to not do this to you. To not write about nothing, and waste your time. And above all else, to not give bad advice, dangerous advice that might actually hurt you. It’s why I take laptop reviews so seriously, because these things are expensive, and you may spend real money on something I recommend. It’s why I test things over and over again, to ensure that whatever assertion I make in the Windows 11 Field Guide isn’t just correct, but is repeatable and will always work.

It’s also what makes what my wife and I are trying to do with Eternal Spring so difficult. This is an industry full of people who travel to a place a single time and then publish “The Complete Guide to” or “Everything You Need to Know About” that place and, I imagine, have no problem sleeping at night. My wife and I can’t do that, won’t do that. It’s difficult when you actually give a crap about the outcome for other people.

I’m not congratulating myself here, it’s just interesting timing. I don’t always get it right. But I do try. And this terrible article, a single tiny blinking star in a galaxy of absolute bullshit just like it, is why. Because the alternative is unimaginable. I can’t do it. I won’t do it.

But I will call it out. And keep trying. What else can you do?