Although this was a beautiful piece I can't help but feel Dan Lyons just gave Uncrunched, ParisLemon, TechCrunch and PandoDaily another million pageviews between them for the many rebuttals we're about to see.
HN already auto-deads submissions from several domains; wonder if it'd improve quality around here if those were added to the list, adding some friction into the game they're playing.
"Siegler is constantly mocked by readers as a laughable troll – a mean-spirited, egomaniacal buffoon who is not very bright but thinks he’s the smartest guy in the room, and who, in all of his manic blogging, has left a string of cock-ups and false “scoops” behind him."
I feel you could replace the first word in that with Lyons and it would also be an apt description.
Is there any better mudslinging match in the tech-blogosphere than Lyons vs Apple bloggers?
They conned AOL... committed to staying there in exchange for a big pay then violated the spirit of their agreement by launching a tech fund: a clear conflict of interest.
Personally, I'm really happy to see the tech blog echo chamber start slinging mud at each other instead of whatever the tech company to hate du jour is. The more they make themselves the story the more irrelevant they become.
I've never understood the enormous popularity of M.G. Siegler. His articles are often published without any attributions or even basic spell checking. Yet somehow he's ridden on the coattails of Apple's ascent by positioning himself among the fandom as a "champion of good taste". In interviews he doesn't even come off as particularly pleasant.
It's hard to imagine someone enjoying his level of celebrity without even trying to appear pleasant. Even Steve Jobs reserved the bulk of his ire for those that worked for him, and appeared caring to his audience (customers), even "patronly".
Fanboys on either side of the aisle love to pat themselves on the back and reaffirm--almost daily--that yes, they did buy the best product imaginable. It's the same reason Gruber makes half a million a year writing snarky one liners.
Some sort of subconscious need to find superiority in consumer purchases and brand loyalty. It's kind of disturbing.
People fiercely defend their choice to spend a chunk of money on something, otherwise they wasted their money and look foolish, clearly (to themselves) they are not foolish, so they must have spent the money for the right reasons.
The more this perception is challenged, the more fiercely it gets defended. An attack on $BRAND_OF_CHOICE is viewed as an attack on their choice to invest in it, and thus an personal attack on themselves. So they seek to reaffirm their choices via whatever and whoever will say what they want to hear.
While there is some truth to what you said, I don't think dragging John Gruber is appropriate. One can at least see that a post is well written (I actually think that in terms of plain English, Gruber does the best job within the tech. blogosphere) and that some care and thought has been put into framing a cogent argument. From there, it's up to you to agree or disagree. I am not referring to the links he posts, but the actual writing that he does.
MG Siegler on the other hand has been perfectly described by Lyons. All he does is generate venom, and copious amounts of it, followed by a couple of "Fuck You's"" and so-on. I think he's the National Enquirer of tech. reporting. And hence, ankle biting Chihuahua is more than correct.
If Dan's reading this, good-luck mate. I am glad you called out Siegler's bluff. What he was trying to do with the Path issue was simply 'diversion'. Rake up an issue that can get people talking - loud enough - that it drowns out the issue at hand (callous and selfish handling of privacy in the Silicon Valley).
Gruber wonders "Lyons has always been an ass, but when did he get so bitter? " and says "Siegler is one of the top writers on the Apple beat, period. Good sources, smart analysis, and he’s been right way way way more often than he’s been wrong."
You are right, and Gruber is wrong... in this case. Gruber usually does a good job of citing sources and for the rest of the article he makes some good points. Like I said before, one can agree or disagree. To reiterate though, his rushing to Siegler's defence is just silly. Gruber does himself and his readers a disservice by linking to Siegler's blog. Siegler sensationalizes the smallest of things -something Lyons brings up eloquently- and then is hypocritical enough to try and portray that he actually abhors the practice!
The main reason I wanted to not drag Gruber into the discussion was:
a. Lyons' article makes no mention of him.
b. Gruber and Siegler might write about Apple, but Gruber can actually write, and Siegler can't. Ankle biting chihuahua is just right.
Anyway, you make a good point, and I hope I clarified why I thought Gruber shouldn't be in this list.
Unfortunately I think it is worse than just justifying your purchase; for a lot of people it is defining their identity.
You say "iPhone's are stupid!" and all they hear is "I think YOU are stupid!".
A lot of people define themselves by distilling the version of themselves they want to portray to the world as a collective of company logos and brands.
I don't think it is healthy, but it sure makes sense why people do it.
Come on, you think Google doesn't do this? If anything anywhere on the net is critical of something Google does there will an army of fanboys there within seconds in Google's defense.
Even before Apple consciously set out to harness this, people were self-identifying as Unix people, Microsoft people and even CP/M people. So, yes, Apple consciously leverages this. But, no, the behavior is not solely a result of their effort.
Consider all the tribes that don't even have a coherent "brand" behind them: C people and Ruby people; truck people and sports car people; dog people and cat people; PC gamers and console gamers; new york- and chicago-style pizza people; goths and hipsters and rockabillies; nerds and jocks; white-collar and blue-collar people; etc.
For a lighter and modern take, the recent BBC show Secrets of the Superbrands does a good job showing why we like what we like. I can also second taking some time to watch "The Century of the Self" but its a bit darker.
The "fanboy dismissal" is here, as usal, a cop out. It's the same copout that 2/3 of the commentariat falls back on whenever the subject comes up of why Apple is so successful. Must be those fanboys, that pixie dust, that RDF...
"Some sort of subconscious need to find superiority in consumer purchases and brand loyalty. It's kind of disturbing."
Or maybe it's just a good blog?
Despite happily not owning a Mac for almost a decade I've continued to read Gruber all this time because his signal to noise ratio is off the charts compared to any other tech blogger. His voice is unique and entertaining. The entire layout is clean and sparse. It's one of the few tech RSS feeds you know isn't going to be knee deep in repackaged press releases and bullshit false equivalence analysis.
If all you had to do to make a half million dollars a year was turn out snarky one liners there'd be a lot more millionaires in the world.
Eh, I'll be the counter-point here in that I do own a Mac, love it for the hardware which is amazing, but can't stand Gruber or his ilk. I'm not really sure what draws you to him, but I can tell you just cause I like Mac doesn't mean I want to go find superiority in it or read Gruber's nonsense.
I don't think this can be construed as 'fanboy dismissal', though the term 'fanboy' itself is controversial.
Post purchase dissonance reduction is a well known cognitive bias[1]. And what can be better for dissonance reduction than someone telling you that you have good taste, and anyone who buys the competition is a philistine?
I should point out that this does not impute anything to the quality of the products themselves. I just posit that blogs such as Gruber's play a active part in the ecosystem due to our cognitive biases. They are not merely a passive observer.
This might be one of the best comments I've ever read on the web.
These gadgets are EXPENSIVE. If you're clearing $15.00 an hour and you buy a smartphone, that's 15-40 hours of your life that you've dedicated to that little machine. You can see why there would be fervor over those devices, especially for those enthusiasts that have to work so hard to afford them in the first place.
> It's the same copout that 2/3 of the commentariat falls back on whenever the subject comes up of why Apple is so successful. Must be those fanboys, that pixie dust, that RDF...
It's the other way around: Apple isn't successful because of Gruber and Siegler, Gruber and Siegler are successful because they tied their fortunes to Apple.
Siegler falls into the category of "irritainment", entertainment via irritation. He's the type of guy you love to hate and I believe a lot of his popularity stems from that. I can't stand the guy and I think he's completely full of shit. And yet I read almost all of his blog posts.
The only other TechCrunch writer that I regularly read is Devin Coldewey and that's because he has interesting articles and actually seems knowledgeable about technology. In other words I have learned things from his blog posts.
Nasty little ankle-biting Matty the Angry Chihuaha, hoho how wonderfully droll :) It may very well be verging on the meta-hypocritical but unlike Siegler at least this man has a flair for the written word.
It's tempting to dismiss this as just e-lebrity gossip, but I think that this kind of rottenness is probably more dangerous to the Valley than threats from Washington or talk of bubbles. If who you know and how well you can politic overshadows what you did and the results you got, then you're in trouble.
If somebody is an unscrupulous douchebag, don't to business with them, don't read their blogs, don't upvote their articles. Treat them like the trolls they are.
As a rule, the only thing that can kill a good _ecosystem_ is the _ecosystem_ itself
Edit: We live in a democracy. If there is something that stands to significantly harm us, then we should (and can) do something about it. A recent example would be SOPA.
The biggest threat we face is not from Washington, it's ourselves. If we become so torn-apart that forces from Washington can destroy us, it's our fault.
It's rather easy to focus on problems being caused from an external force, but there are often larger and more dangerous threats internally. That brings up back to the startup quote, it's easy for a startup to focus on competitors (external threat) instead of working on their own product (which is really the biggest thing that will make or break them).
I definitely see the similarities and would agree with it. Nearly every successful entrepreneur will talk at length about the incredible importance of company culture on success (as that culture in turn permeates through the product, customer service, hiring process etc). I don't see why the same principles would become invalid at the slightly higher level of startup ecosystem.
It's plausible, but a corporate ecosystem is a lot different than a corporation. For example, the utility functions are different, the role and authority of leadership, the risk involved for each participant. Actually, it's quite a different beast.
Plus, I can think of plenty of ways external influences COULD kill the startup ecosystem. Congress could pass laws that make it much harder to start companies. Developers could figure out that the startup value proposition is not that great if you're not a founder. The market for internet ads could dry up (a significant risk to many startup business models). Big companies could develop techniques to quickly iterate on products rather than ceding ground to more agile startups. Laws could change that make it more expensive to acquire startups. Other industries could be created that make startups less enticing to young people. Taxes and security laws could change in a way that makes it much harder to distribute equity to employees.
Any of these things could kill the startup ecosystem depending on the magnitude of the change, and probably a lot of other stuff I'm not even thinking about. The idea that the ecosystem could kill itself also seems pretty preposterous to me. There are parts of the country where there isn't much of an ecosystem, but startups still exist. Startups aren't created because of an ecosystem, but because it is financially and economically advantageous to do so for some people.
Yeah, overall this view that the ecosystem is invulnerable from outside pressures and highly vulnerable to interior ones strikes me as fairly naive.
We don't live in anything close to democracy. It's hard for a populous to change a corrupt system when all the cards are stacked against the greater public.
Silicon Valley is not the greater public, it is a collection of very talented, motivated, rich people. It could be very influential in Washington, but until recently has chosen to avoid it instead.
Not shitty and unethical per se, but any behavior that compromises the value function of a given ecosystem will cause regulators to step in, in an attempt to correct it.
If who you know and how well you can politic overshadows what you did and the results you got, then you're in trouble.
For me its just another sign that 'tech' is growing up. Pretty much any industry creates an economic flow, and the flow is a source of power (some would argue the only real source in peace time), and one can harness that power by having influence over the flow.
Back when the Homebrew Computer Club was meeting and Steve and Steve were there and nerds gathered at the ByteShop to see the latest S-100 board that Geoge Morrow had dreamed up, the total flow was measured in less than a million dollars a year. Few 'professional' power brokers even noticed. Today the total economic impact of 'tech' is approaching a trillion dollars by some estimates, with that kind of flow comes real power. You also get a different class of players in the game.
We joke about people who would sell out their families for a million dollars, however that number gets uncomfortably large as you go up in decimal orders of magnitude. 10 million, 100 million, a billion ?
The stakes are higher today, some people are the barrier to entry you have to get past. It hasn't been a "gentleman's game" for some time now. Kinda sad really.
I think one of the challenges with growing up is that you have to work increasingly hard at preserving that which made you special.
As others have argued, "Don't be Evil" is Google trying to inoculate itself against growing up too much and always having a nagging reminder to strive to be the company they were in their youth. Perhaps the valley was never a gentleman's game, but it was (and still is) much more so than other industries.
Really? I remember reading about all the crap between Apple/Microsoft/Xerox (in the late 80s/90s) none of it could be described as even close a 'gentlemen's game".
It's important to realize that this is how many industries work because it's practically human nature. The article basically boils down to "influential people in tech can be greedy/power-hungry." I often get the impression that those involved in tech are viewed as more advanced or more noble than in other industries. This is false, and a dangerous assumption. Tech is not full of angels - it's full of people. SV people are just as capable as politicians of being greedy or underhanded or even selfless.
"If men were angels, no government would be necessary." -James Madison
I think it is more serious than you make it sound. This article describes a racket that resembles mafia behavior.
“Pay seven figures a year to buy a corporate subscription to my newsletter and I’ll say nice things about your company, and when the press needs a quote, I’ll be there to puff you up. Or, don’t buy a subscription and I will bash you relentlessly.”
This is not a new game. "No one gets fired for buying IBM" was born, then later became "No one gets fired for buying Microsoft" on the back of "industry journals" that were more or less the dead-tree version of the rackets Fake Steve is describing. None of this is new. This, more or less, is the history of subscription trade journals in every industry for the last 100 years.
Model is thus: Subscribe to our journal, we'll ply you for survey responses/advertising. Fail to pay? You won't get reviewed or if so, it won't be flattering. Advertise? You'll be reviewed, and positively so. Oh, and we'll charge you for the report born of the analysis of the survey data you gave us. Repeat for all major players in a niche field. Welcome to industry publishing.
I'm not sure. Sleaze tends to correlate with easy money. Before 1997 or so most of the people I knew that were in tech were in it primarily for love but when all the easy capital started flowing in suddenly the quick buck hucksters started coming out of the woodwork. Very few of the latter stuck around after the first dotcom crash.
Right now a lot of dumb money is pouring into tech because there's nowhere else for it to go. I'm seeing a lot of the same kinds of low class opportunists popping up as a result.
I believe you are thinking about the rent-seekers. About that time when someone in business school realized 'hey, these guys are defining new fundamental concepts, if we could patent those we could just sit back and roll in the cash!' There was a tremendous shift from open disclosure of all the technology to 'just the necessary bits to operate' around that time. Comparing the PC/AT technical manual (with BIOS listings!) to the PS/2 manual? DEC went from publishing system schematics to just 'diagnostic notes'.
I had hoped that the open source wave that hit after the dot com crash would have reminded people about why openness leads to growth not stagnation but I don't think it has.
Interesting definition of "tech" that seems to exclude companies like HP, IBM, Atari, Xerox and more that would have had just a little bit more that 1MM/year in flow.
I completely agree. Would you trust Yelp for restaurant reviews if Yelp invested in the restaurants it provided reviews for? Of course not. Like you said, the only way to really punish behavior like this is to stop using their product.
Speaking of bubbles, the optimistic part of me thinks that this really is a bubble, and that the next time the Valley crashes, all the sharks and trolls will be reaped and only honest people will be left to rebuild. It's better to imagine it than the alternative.
Every industry has people within it that are unethical or try to game the system for their own benefit at the expense of others. If anything the technology industry is unique in how much good it has done, relative to the bad.
No, the world isn't seriously this disgusting. What you are looking at isn't even Silicon Valley. It's a bunch of fucking bloggers jerking around. Yeah, there are a lot of people who (for some reason) give a fuck. Some of these bloggers even have significant influence as a result. But please remember all the people with their nose on the grindstone doing real work in the Valley and elsewhere. They are the majority, and they are the tech scene. Lyon's Silicon Cesspool isn't the tech scene, it's the blogosphere, which has always been a piece of shit. Disregard it, and remember, "Friends don't let friends read TechCrunch."
Is the world seriously this disgusting and I just haven't realized it yet?
To some extent, yeah, it is. I don't just mean in tech, thats the nature of the world. Without some cognitive dissidence and rationalization, we'd all be neurotic messes. Or psychopaths.
I think the core of the problem is not TechCrunch or person X or Y. The core problem is advertising disguised as journalism. The solution is legislation against this. Famous direct marketer Dan Kennedy said that the most efficient marketing is always illegal, and for example infomercials on TV are now legally restricted because they were too "dangerous" for consumers.
I think there would be something along the lines of would be what's required:
"Disclaimer: [$thisBlog] is an investor in [$company]"
...right underneath the story headline involving a company they were involved with. It would force "journalists" to at least pretend to be somewhat objective.
Yes I think that is a minimum. Still the other concern is the kind of racket that is described: you pay or we won't mention you, or worse we will destroy your reputation (hitman).
"Or, don’t buy a subscription and I will bash you relentlessly.” Most big companies paid up and considered it a cost of doing business."
Advertising must be truthful and non-deceptive;
Advertisers must have evidence to back up their claims; and
Advertisements cannot be unfair.
Additional laws apply to ads for specialized products like consumer leases, credit, 900 telephone numbers, and products sold through mail order or telephone sales. And every state has consumer protection laws that govern ads running in that state."
You think this consumer protection laws should be removed?
So basically it's only a matter of time before the ideals of the "gold rush" go away and everyone's just in it for the money?
I came to Silicon Valley to escape that (the alternative, at the time, was Wall Street). Unfortunately, this kind of behavior (and these kind of people) seem to 'follow the money'.
*Note: This is both about the conversation that companies are abusing consumers and then apologizing later, and the tech blogger community and Lyons' accusations
I get the same exact feeling. The frequency of lax startup ethics seems to be increasing by the count of HN articles reporting it. I left wall street for the same reason you mention. More and more we hear 'this time it's different', but from SV investors. Always a troubling sign.
Well, I can't back this up with hard numbers at this point, but I'm pretty sure that the SF Bay Area has lead the nation in hiring since 2008. Also, where else in the US are you hearing about people becoming rich beyond their wildest dreams? Or about how a new company IPOing will bring about 1000 millionaires? I dont see it anywhere else
Granted, I think it's more accurate to say that "tech" is the one doing the hiring and making people rich, not the SF Bay Area itself. But since this is the nexus of the (consumer internet) tech industry worldwide, I think its safe to say that a lot of that opportunity is found here
I think the warning signs of a 'gold rush' are when ethics go out the window (most recent example is the mortgage industry). Capitalism is all about going where the money is but if the correct rules aren't in place and the culture isn't strong enough the whole system goes to hell like a badly moderated news forum. The key question about SV of today is: are the correct rules and culture in place to keep the gold rush healthy and sustainable?
Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, Chris Dixon, Saul Klein, Josh Kopelman, CrunchFund, Greylock Partners, Accel Partners, Menlo Ventures, Lerer Ventures
Many of these are top class investors and certainly don't expect a return on their money from a startup tech blog. But they might expect favorable reviews of their portfolio companies when launch time comes or when shit hits the fan.
Exactly, I fear this too. I like Sarah Lacey, and I think she does have integrity.
But I can't help but feel this is the investors simply moving up the food chain to protect their startups. Rather than rebutting against the media when their own startups are attacked, they have obtained an inside position at source.
I don't believe Sarah thinks this will happen (or she feels she can push back and mitigate) but I'm [sadly] confident this kind of internal pressure will occur at some point.
Fuck it, if I'd invested in her media venture I'd want preferential treatment. And I'm ex BBC with a 'no bias' agenda beaten into me it hurts.
I spent 6 years reading internal BBC emails. Can't comment for the rest of the BBC, but nothing comes close to the integrity of BBC News.
>But the BBC gives preferential treatment to the BBC
Go read any BBC news story right now and scroll to the bottom. They even link out to other news sites covering the same story. I can't think of another news website that links to competitors like that.
BBC News certainly doesn't give preferential treatment to BBC.
I stopped reading techcrunch about 9 months ago, after realizing that the majority of articles were friends of the author - and realizing it was almost impossible to get featured on there unless you were connected in some kind of monetary way.
And finally, in 2012, after mocking and lambasting traditional reportage and journalistic standards for years, the Internet finally learns that journalistic standards, expectations, and ethics are a set of rules learned the hard way, that are as relevant on the web as they were in print.
Hopefully this is the beginning of the end for "it's just a blog, man".
It's not that proper journalism is irrelevant, and it's not even that not everyone should be expected to be proper journalists. It's that proper journalism is a very small niche, not the norm. There isn't much actual market demand for proper journalism compared to the other crap; most readers and viewers are undiscerning and everyone else is willing to pay, so why bother?
It was probably this way even before the internet. I mean, they award themselves the "Pulitzer Prize"--go look up the guy that one's named after.
Cool, so for the billionth example, makers make something -- good or bad -- that creates a commotion and the chattering class gets to ride the waves. This time, it's Path. What is this article in the OP, 3rd, 4th degree of separation from the actual event in question?
It's enough to toss it all in the shitter and just judge things on their own merits: products, apologies and whatever else. Journalists bickering at each other over what exactly? Who cares.
Ugh. I think my work life frustration is spilling over into my comments.
<Quote> Not big investments — maybe $100,000. They don’t need your money; they can raise money from anyone.
</Quote>
I dont agree with this. Many startup companies have to prove their mettle to get an investor want to invest in them. Also, there are significant chance of any startup going bust. He does not supplement what the odds are in making 10x/100x returns. So its difficult to buy the concept that just investing in them will make you richer in a few years. However, I do think Michael Arrington is doing what he can to protect his investment. But I dont think its the other way round..i.e -> Startups are not necessarily filtering investors based on the influencing ability of the investor.
The real question is whether CrunchFund is leading or following. If they just follow, once other big names are committed, then frankly the value-added for startups is close to 0.
This kind of thing - not the exact events or people described, but the atmosphere conveyed - is exactly what's been turning me off from Silicon Valley. I've interned here twice, and I know that it's full of the top engineers in the world. Yet the underbelly seems to be full of these ridiculous cutthroat business practices and an atmosphere of self-indulgence, self-importance etc, most likely because Silicon Valley is where the money is. It seems like it's turning into the Hollywood of the tech industry, and not in a good way. T'would be a shame.
I feel like this is a part of the larger conversation of how the dynamics of Silicon Valley are changing (at least from my insulated perspective). I'm not going to sit in my arm chair and smatter Silicon Valley but I enjoyed and respected the culture and environment of SV much more 5 to 10 years ago. It may be untrue but I feel like SV is becoming increasingly dominated by hustlers and scheisters and it has become more difficult to effectively collaborate with the many true technologists there. Actually took a job last year outside of the traditional SV circle of companies to take a break from the atmosphere and have found it to be surprisingly more fun from a technological perspective than the consumer internet products I was building previously.
How about we start to act on this by not posting and/or flagging every post from pandodaily, techcrunch, and uncrunched? I think we'd have a better HN experience all around.
Dan isn't innocent here - some of his older posts are sickeningly obvious puff-pieces or hit jobs... of course, he's not excusing himself here or claiming he's not part of the muck he's deriding.
But every once in a while (esp. when he did FakeSteveJobs), Dan hits it out of the park, and this is one of those articles. The crunchfund conflict of interest is concerning.
209 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 259 ms ] threadI feel you could replace the first word in that with Lyons and it would also be an apt description.
Is there any better mudslinging match in the tech-blogosphere than Lyons vs Apple bloggers?
Some sort of subconscious need to find superiority in consumer purchases and brand loyalty. It's kind of disturbing.
The more this perception is challenged, the more fiercely it gets defended. An attack on $BRAND_OF_CHOICE is viewed as an attack on their choice to invest in it, and thus an personal attack on themselves. So they seek to reaffirm their choices via whatever and whoever will say what they want to hear.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognative_dissonance
MG Siegler on the other hand has been perfectly described by Lyons. All he does is generate venom, and copious amounts of it, followed by a couple of "Fuck You's"" and so-on. I think he's the National Enquirer of tech. reporting. And hence, ankle biting Chihuahua is more than correct.
If Dan's reading this, good-luck mate. I am glad you called out Siegler's bluff. What he was trying to do with the Path issue was simply 'diversion'. Rake up an issue that can get people talking - loud enough - that it drowns out the issue at hand (callous and selfish handling of privacy in the Silicon Valley).
http://daringfireball.net/2011/08/balls
Gruber and Siegler are symbiotes and it is entirely appropriate to drag Siegler in.
a. Lyons' article makes no mention of him. b. Gruber and Siegler might write about Apple, but Gruber can actually write, and Siegler can't. Ankle biting chihuahua is just right.
Anyway, you make a good point, and I hope I clarified why I thought Gruber shouldn't be in this list.
You say "iPhone's are stupid!" and all they hear is "I think YOU are stupid!".
A lot of people define themselves by distilling the version of themselves they want to portray to the world as a collective of company logos and brands.
I don't think it is healthy, but it sure makes sense why people do it.
Harley Davidson is another example where this occurs.
Consider all the tribes that don't even have a coherent "brand" behind them: C people and Ruby people; truck people and sports car people; dog people and cat people; PC gamers and console gamers; new york- and chicago-style pizza people; goths and hipsters and rockabillies; nerds and jocks; white-collar and blue-collar people; etc.
You a farmer in Illinois? Then the noun could be "John Deer" or "Monsanto" and you'll get appropriate responses.
If you are a chef in New York you could say "Dilantium Knives" are/aren't stupid and get an appropriate response and so on.
We are a lot like race car drivers anymore; draping the brands of the companies we are proud to identify ourselves by.
"Some sort of subconscious need to find superiority in consumer purchases and brand loyalty. It's kind of disturbing."
Or maybe it's just a good blog?
Despite happily not owning a Mac for almost a decade I've continued to read Gruber all this time because his signal to noise ratio is off the charts compared to any other tech blogger. His voice is unique and entertaining. The entire layout is clean and sparse. It's one of the few tech RSS feeds you know isn't going to be knee deep in repackaged press releases and bullshit false equivalence analysis.
If all you had to do to make a half million dollars a year was turn out snarky one liners there'd be a lot more millionaires in the world.
Post purchase dissonance reduction is a well known cognitive bias[1]. And what can be better for dissonance reduction than someone telling you that you have good taste, and anyone who buys the competition is a philistine?
I should point out that this does not impute anything to the quality of the products themselves. I just posit that blogs such as Gruber's play a active part in the ecosystem due to our cognitive biases. They are not merely a passive observer.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-purchase_rationalization
These gadgets are EXPENSIVE. If you're clearing $15.00 an hour and you buy a smartphone, that's 15-40 hours of your life that you've dedicated to that little machine. You can see why there would be fervor over those devices, especially for those enthusiasts that have to work so hard to afford them in the first place.
It's the other way around: Apple isn't successful because of Gruber and Siegler, Gruber and Siegler are successful because they tied their fortunes to Apple.
The only other TechCrunch writer that I regularly read is Devin Coldewey and that's because he has interesting articles and actually seems knowledgeable about technology. In other words I have learned things from his blog posts.
Then please, stop reading his blog posts, it's the only way he'll learn.
If somebody is an unscrupulous douchebag, don't to business with them, don't read their blogs, don't upvote their articles. Treat them like the trolls they are.
As a rule, the only thing that can kill a good _ecosystem_ is the _ecosystem_ itself
Edit: We live in a democracy. If there is something that stands to significantly harm us, then we should (and can) do something about it. A recent example would be SOPA.
The biggest threat we face is not from Washington, it's ourselves. If we become so torn-apart that forces from Washington can destroy us, it's our fault.
It's rather easy to focus on problems being caused from an external force, but there are often larger and more dangerous threats internally. That brings up back to the startup quote, it's easy for a startup to focus on competitors (external threat) instead of working on their own product (which is really the biggest thing that will make or break them).
> As a rule, the only thing that can kill a good _human_ is the _human_ itself.
Plus, I can think of plenty of ways external influences COULD kill the startup ecosystem. Congress could pass laws that make it much harder to start companies. Developers could figure out that the startup value proposition is not that great if you're not a founder. The market for internet ads could dry up (a significant risk to many startup business models). Big companies could develop techniques to quickly iterate on products rather than ceding ground to more agile startups. Laws could change that make it more expensive to acquire startups. Other industries could be created that make startups less enticing to young people. Taxes and security laws could change in a way that makes it much harder to distribute equity to employees.
Any of these things could kill the startup ecosystem depending on the magnitude of the change, and probably a lot of other stuff I'm not even thinking about. The idea that the ecosystem could kill itself also seems pretty preposterous to me. There are parts of the country where there isn't much of an ecosystem, but startups still exist. Startups aren't created because of an ecosystem, but because it is financially and economically advantageous to do so for some people.
Yeah, overall this view that the ecosystem is invulnerable from outside pressures and highly vulnerable to interior ones strikes me as fairly naive.
We don't live in anything close to democracy. It's hard for a populous to change a corrupt system when all the cards are stacked against the greater public.
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/populous adjective
For me its just another sign that 'tech' is growing up. Pretty much any industry creates an economic flow, and the flow is a source of power (some would argue the only real source in peace time), and one can harness that power by having influence over the flow.
Back when the Homebrew Computer Club was meeting and Steve and Steve were there and nerds gathered at the ByteShop to see the latest S-100 board that Geoge Morrow had dreamed up, the total flow was measured in less than a million dollars a year. Few 'professional' power brokers even noticed. Today the total economic impact of 'tech' is approaching a trillion dollars by some estimates, with that kind of flow comes real power. You also get a different class of players in the game.
We joke about people who would sell out their families for a million dollars, however that number gets uncomfortably large as you go up in decimal orders of magnitude. 10 million, 100 million, a billion ?
The stakes are higher today, some people are the barrier to entry you have to get past. It hasn't been a "gentleman's game" for some time now. Kinda sad really.
As others have argued, "Don't be Evil" is Google trying to inoculate itself against growing up too much and always having a nagging reminder to strive to be the company they were in their youth. Perhaps the valley was never a gentleman's game, but it was (and still is) much more so than other industries.
Are we that different to any other industry?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3521817
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3516314
There are days we can't even disagree like gentlemen here. :-(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy
"If men were angels, no government would be necessary." -James Madison
“Pay seven figures a year to buy a corporate subscription to my newsletter and I’ll say nice things about your company, and when the press needs a quote, I’ll be there to puff you up. Or, don’t buy a subscription and I will bash you relentlessly.”
Model is thus: Subscribe to our journal, we'll ply you for survey responses/advertising. Fail to pay? You won't get reviewed or if so, it won't be flattering. Advertise? You'll be reviewed, and positively so. Oh, and we'll charge you for the report born of the analysis of the survey data you gave us. Repeat for all major players in a niche field. Welcome to industry publishing.
Right now a lot of dumb money is pouring into tech because there's nowhere else for it to go. I'm seeing a lot of the same kinds of low class opportunists popping up as a result.
I had hoped that the open source wave that hit after the dot com crash would have reminded people about why openness leads to growth not stagnation but I don't think it has.
For me it's another sign that 'tech' has some serious growing up to do.
I'm way ahead of you.
Is this seriously what we're all working at? A complex power play to get yourself rich at the expense of any morals or integrity?
How much is /your/ soul worth?
We have real problems in the world, but instead we have a bunch of boys with computers trying to rule the world through their control of media.
Is the world seriously this disgusting and I just haven't realized it yet?
Every industry makes this rationalization.
To some extent, yeah, it is. I don't just mean in tech, thats the nature of the world. Without some cognitive dissidence and rationalization, we'd all be neurotic messes. Or psychopaths.
Please people. Stop. Upvoting. This. Crap.
"Disclaimer: [$thisBlog] is an investor in [$company]"
...right underneath the story headline involving a company they were involved with. It would force "journalists" to at least pretend to be somewhat objective.
"Or, don’t buy a subscription and I will bash you relentlessly.” Most big companies paid up and considered it a cost of doing business."
Advertising must be truthful and non-deceptive; Advertisers must have evidence to back up their claims; and Advertisements cannot be unfair.
Additional laws apply to ads for specialized products like consumer leases, credit, 900 telephone numbers, and products sold through mail order or telephone sales. And every state has consumer protection laws that govern ads running in that state."
You think this consumer protection laws should be removed?
I came to Silicon Valley to escape that (the alternative, at the time, was Wall Street). Unfortunately, this kind of behavior (and these kind of people) seem to 'follow the money'.
*Note: This is both about the conversation that companies are abusing consumers and then apologizing later, and the tech blogger community and Lyons' accusations
(I'm just interested. It would be nice to hear more.)
Granted, I think it's more accurate to say that "tech" is the one doing the hiring and making people rich, not the SF Bay Area itself. But since this is the nexus of the (consumer internet) tech industry worldwide, I think its safe to say that a lot of that opportunity is found here
And Silicon Valley has been "about the money" for 20-30 years now. When Wozniak left Apple is a good milestone for when it became "about the money".
Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, Chris Dixon, Saul Klein, Josh Kopelman, CrunchFund, Greylock Partners, Accel Partners, Menlo Ventures, Lerer Ventures
Many of these are top class investors and certainly don't expect a return on their money from a startup tech blog. But they might expect favorable reviews of their portfolio companies when launch time comes or when shit hits the fan.
But I can't help but feel this is the investors simply moving up the food chain to protect their startups. Rather than rebutting against the media when their own startups are attacked, they have obtained an inside position at source.
I don't believe Sarah thinks this will happen (or she feels she can push back and mitigate) but I'm [sadly] confident this kind of internal pressure will occur at some point.
Fuck it, if I'd invested in her media venture I'd want preferential treatment. And I'm ex BBC with a 'no bias' agenda beaten into me it hurts.
All news channels are "biased". You can only integrate and filter.
>But the BBC gives preferential treatment to the BBC
Go read any BBC news story right now and scroll to the bottom. They even link out to other news sites covering the same story. I can't think of another news website that links to competitors like that.
BBC News certainly doesn't give preferential treatment to BBC.
Hopefully this is the beginning of the end for "it's just a blog, man".
It was probably this way even before the internet. I mean, they award themselves the "Pulitzer Prize"--go look up the guy that one's named after.
It's no co-incidence. Techcrunch is the same as it was 2 years back, probably venom from Siegler has increased
It's enough to toss it all in the shitter and just judge things on their own merits: products, apologies and whatever else. Journalists bickering at each other over what exactly? Who cares.
Ugh. I think my work life frustration is spilling over into my comments.
I dont agree with this. Many startup companies have to prove their mettle to get an investor want to invest in them. Also, there are significant chance of any startup going bust. He does not supplement what the odds are in making 10x/100x returns. So its difficult to buy the concept that just investing in them will make you richer in a few years. However, I do think Michael Arrington is doing what he can to protect his investment. But I dont think its the other way round..i.e -> Startups are not necessarily filtering investors based on the influencing ability of the investor.
I'm glad this guy had the guts to call people out for who they truly are. Though I am sure this is far from the end of it all....
But every once in a while (esp. when he did FakeSteveJobs), Dan hits it out of the park, and this is one of those articles. The crunchfund conflict of interest is concerning.