Hacker News Reader

Comment by bedhead | Hacker News Reader

Ugh. Such a piece of trash organization that sadly represents today's "new" media. Mostly just useless clickbait (eg, headline reads "Stock Crashing!" when it's down like 5.5%) and re-posting of other real organizations' work, like Reuters and the AP. Or some worthless anecdote crafted into an "article" written by some horrible 24 year old about why Abercrombie & Fitch is "really" struggling. BI is the remora fish of the "news" world. All with the occasional laughably wrong piece by Henry Blodget on Apple, or the stock market.

Oh well, whatever. Hell of a second act for that guy.

View on HN

I know of plenty really worthy startups solving real business problems, who struggle to survive or went out of business, because they could not get more financing.

And then you have investors throwing a lot of money at a laughable, trashy "news" media outlet.

I just don't understand this world anymore.

There is an issue with startups in that we are constantly fed the line that we must aspire to be billion dollar companies or we won't get funding. This puts the focus on the wrong areas if we want to solve hard (real) problems. It's much easier to build a company that makes money than one that solves the difficult problems we are facing today. Almost all VC style investors like to roll out the billion dollar line. I believe in building things that help the world and her people even if it is not a billion dollar idea. Not all worthwhile ideas are profitable. If I am successful the billion dollars will be a (an admittedly welcome) side effect but I can't get excited by it being a goal and I'm hesitant on working with people who do get excited by it.

To put it another way no one is going to remember you because you bought a sports car.

haha indeed! Then we also have these stupid investors throwing money at some kids renting out their homes for some little money, we have hotels for that kind of stuff!

Right - but Business Insider, unlike a the "really worthy startups," don't actually provide a lot of value to the world.

BI did.

Sounds like a perfect fit. Axel Springer publishes "Bild" in Germany which is essentially the written version of click bait/sensationalism.

While plenty of their articles are useless clickbait, they have earned my respect by also writing a high % of the articles that I find useful and interesting. Searched my gmail to find the last article of theirs I sent around: http://www.businessinsider.com/share-of-media-time-spent-201...

Seriously?? That is a single chart, free of commentary, quotes, context...anything. And it's sourced from - shock - yet another "real" organization! Meanwhile, look at the rest of the page. It's entirely banner ads, sponsored content, clickbait about what Ann Coulter thinks of Donald Trump, and other drivel ("Forget Shake Shack — this is the burger chain everyone is talking about").

I'm telling you, 95% of what BI employees do is scan news from actual companies, then repost it. It's a sad state of affairs that BI is worth almost as much as Tribune, and not terribly less than the New York Times.

That's not even an article, it's a single graph. An unsourced one at that, with no methodology provided. It is essentially worthless eye-candy.

> an unsourced one at that

"Source: eMarketer, April 2014"

Different generation consumes news differently. I am the "newspapers" generation, but I found BI useful. If it is clickbait, I just skip it. The UI/UX makes easy to skip things you don't like. Try to do that on a piece of newspaper...

With that said, I did skip a lot on BI. I go to BI because of its fast updates and maybe just a habit.

> Oh well, whatever. Hell of a second act for that guy.

And a much more legal one, too. For those that don't know the history on Blodget, you should look it up. He's barred for life from the securities industry. Silicon Valley really is the place for second chances. He played this game of musical chairs correctly.

> Silicon Valley really is the place for second chances.

Silicon Valley is also a place where using misinformation to manipulate the price of securities is the local trade, rather than something that will get you in trouble with the authorities.

In fairness to the prosecutors, it is really, really hard to prove insider trading cases. You have to prove, with evidence, that the person traded on confidential information. Short of already wiretapping someone's phone or email, that's hard to prove. That said, I still can't believe the number of people who stupidly send out this information over email or text, rather than face to face.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com