"Most of the content we read in a newspaper [sic] is false" is a very strong assertion to make, especially because in this case it is blatantly untrue. Basecamp's "radical transparency" was accompanied by a lot of explicit public messaging from the company's leadership, along with disclosure of internal discussions and the circumstances that led to the new policy. You can assert that there were falsehoods in particular articles about Basecamp, but everything I read tended to be fully supported by public disclosures from the company or disclosures from veteran employees (not a disgruntled junior employee that got laid off, someone with 5+ years at the company who decided to depart).
The author has points they intend to make and I won't claim that they are implicitly untrue (the argument that newspapers serve as unintentional propaganda has a lot of support behind it), but this situation does not support the points they are trying to make.
Lets not be too generous. No one wants to read "Investigation of tomato juice in mouse models cured cancer in 52.36%, compared to test group". They want to read "Tomato juice cures cancer".
People want easy solutions and cheap answers. Sadly reality doesn't work like that.
So true. The author implies that “lack of seriousness” causes newspaper falsehoods and thus falls into the cognitive bias of confusing bugs with features.
Yup, especially when you get to higher levels of government. If the solution was easy, it wouldn't reach the presidential level for instance. A low level manager at a department would have fixed it without notice or media attention. When shit reaches that level, its because both sides have big disadvantages and they need someone to make the hard choice of who to hurt.
I get the impression English is not their first language. I will say I've seen articles with worse reasoning and better language also. So as distracting as the errors are, this is far from the lowest quality article I've seen here.
Yes, because "cliché" is a noun and "clichéd" the adjective. It's like saying "that's so age" instead of "that's so old" — it just sounds really jarring and unprofessional.
Author here, I'm sorry for that, I know I'm not very good at writing this king of articles. And that's exactly why I wrote this one, to improve. If you have any resources that could help me improve I would like to hear them. Thank you
Hi, it was not that bad, just use the open source grammar checking tool https://languagetool.org/ and it’ll help you immensely. Their premium is also worth it.
Not sure I see how Twitter is relevant - the author gets to the real answer by the end. DHH and Jason spent years crafting a narrative that they had figured out, quote, "the better way to work," and that they knew how to run a company in ways other people should emulate. They poured their effort into books and podcasts and blogs to create that impression. That's why a lot of people know about this ~50-person company and why a management blunder that causes a third of the company (so far) to leave is newsworthy.
Years ago I worked at a 50-person company that laid off almost all its employees. The only report was from one industry blog (from a blogger who really liked our product and was sad we never made it in the market), and no amount of clicking things on Twitter could have made more people notice. Social media and print media alike can amplify stories people are likely to care about, but there has to be an underlying story in the first place.
The whole mess started because they kept (still keep?) an internal list where they made fun of their customers names for years. No company that is radically transparent can get away with that.
You praise HN because we can have "meaningful" discussions, yet in the next sentence you ask people not to upvote an article just because the author is not great at communicating his thoughts, and makes some grammar mistakes, completely ignoring the "meaning" of the article.
You feel the need to "urge the people" not to upvote it. However, wouldn't it be more "meaningful" to explain why you do (or do not) agree with what is said, instead of just complaining about grammar?
I personally found the article interesting, even though it's poorly written. Instead of ordering others around, what about urging yourself to refrain from commenting unless you have something meaningful to add to the discussion ;)
I’m one of the people who upvoted this post onto the frontpage, because I found it an interesting explanation (in a how-possibly, not a how-actually sense) of the popularity of the news about Basecamp buyouts. I was interested to read what people with more knowledge about this topic might comment.
Could you elaborate on what makes this post „noise“?
Most journalists are just not very good at their profession, they synthesize their content online through social media which has had disastrous downstream effects.
There are a few writers who do groundwork, travel and report from the field but sadly they’re becoming increasingly rare.
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[ 0.28 ms ] story [ 59.3 ms ] threadThe author has points they intend to make and I won't claim that they are implicitly untrue (the argument that newspapers serve as unintentional propaganda has a lot of support behind it), but this situation does not support the points they are trying to make.
Just read an average science column.
“Most of content we read on newspapper is false, not intentionnaly but because of lack of seriousness of the profession.”
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-ge...
People want easy solutions and cheap answers. Sadly reality doesn't work like that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent
Years ago I worked at a 50-person company that laid off almost all its employees. The only report was from one industry blog (from a blogger who really liked our product and was sad we never made it in the market), and no amount of clicking things on Twitter could have made more people notice. Social media and print media alike can amplify stories people are likely to care about, but there has to be an underlying story in the first place.
Your comment only serves to distract from what OP is about.
And who believes that would have been possible without Twitter's amplification algos encouraging the behavior with Likes and Followers.
I have been on HN for over six months now and I admire how people here can go into deep discussions, unlike, let's say Reddit.
But it seems like there is a lot of noise on HN now, with poorly written articles like these, which I think makes HN less appealing.
I urge the people to not upvote these posts to the front page.
You feel the need to "urge the people" not to upvote it. However, wouldn't it be more "meaningful" to explain why you do (or do not) agree with what is said, instead of just complaining about grammar?
I personally found the article interesting, even though it's poorly written. Instead of ordering others around, what about urging yourself to refrain from commenting unless you have something meaningful to add to the discussion ;)
Could you elaborate on what makes this post „noise“?
There are a few writers who do groundwork, travel and report from the field but sadly they’re becoming increasingly rare.