My Thoughts on Techcrunch and Brusilovsky (Loren Feldman)
1938media.com
1938media.com
We are all a part of this mess. We all play the numbers games. We all assume that people with more readers are more important. We all strive to have more readers so that we can be more important. We worry about pageviews and clickthroughs and every other possible way we can possibly whore ourselves out because everybody else is doing it and telling us how much fun they're having doing it.
TechCrunch is only well-read because it's well-read. People don't just stumble upon it and fall in love. They go to it because they've been told how many other people have gone to it. And we have decided it's still okay to rate things based on how frequently other people go to them.
Brusilovsky is a prick. Not because he accepted a present from a business, but because he's spent his entire life doing vacuous, meaningless work in exchange for attention and celebrity. We all gawk and applaud that it's so nice a 17-year-old managed to write for TechCrunch, but when you look at the guy you realize he can't code, can't design, can't write. All he can do is whore, and even that he doesn't do well. But he writes for TechCrunch and so he's worth our time.
We care more about quantity than we do about quality, as an industry. Witness the recent conversation about the Google redesign contest, with people bitching and moaning about how the new aesthetic design was "worse" than Google's current design because it denied information. We have this mindset wherein we still think Google ought to be everything for everyone; the result is that Google meets a lot of people's needs without really providing a breathtaking experience. Google's the archetypal villain here, that cares more about edging out clickthroughs than it does about anything else. And yeah, it's nice, and yeah, it's made Google the industry leader, but in the end being ranked #1 means jack shit, or ought to. It doesn't make you in any way better or more valuable.
It comes up in fucking everything. Mac vs Linux vs PC arguments are the same way: We're so determined that what we want ought to be what everybody wants. So rather than discussing feeling and process we discuss pure, blunt numbers. We're just as childish as the people Loren scolds here. We think about our world in the simplest, more black-and-white terms.
Hacker News was designed to foster this. It "ranks" conversations. It assigns people as "leaders". We have so many fucking posts about what domains get the most upvotes and which users have the best comment average and basically it's all of us sucking our own dicks in the hopes we can get them longer than anybody else's. But this is a debate that's raged for a long time, and this comment won't change things. The people in charge of Hacker News are just as immature about this as anybody.
I'd like it if a few of us, just a few, saw this and decided that perhaps spending a lifetime looking for more numbers and variables and stats isn't the best way to spend a life. In the end, we're playing a schmuck 17-year-old's game, as much as we'd like to pretend we're doing anything remotely meaningful.
That's a 2008 onwards phenomenon. I'm a TechCrunch fan and have been a reader since 2005 (though I only follow on Twitter now because they post too much). Back then, people genuinely appreciated TechCrunch because it combined a few magic ingredients:
- pithy, well written posts - occasional outbursts of humor or insight - irreverence for the companies profiled but reverence for the Web 2.0 ideal
Up until around the 60k FeedBurner reader area, TechCrunch seemed, to me, to be very well reviewed and appreciated by its audience.
After that, though, it started to end up on almost every RSS reader's default subscription list and.. blam, the number rocketed up to 1M subscribers pretty quick and the number of posts each day went through the roof as well. Suddenly it was a high traffic site for the "everyman" rather than the reasonably small Web 2.0 cabal. That's when the "well-read because it's well-read" stuff clicked together - but it wasn't always that way!
Umm, no. We worry about those things because more pageviews and more clicks = more money. And some of us are actually interested in making money.
What does "meaningful" even mean to you? If Google did provide a "breathtaking experience", how would that be any more meaningful in the long run? Useful is better than innovative.
But yours is the voice I most disagree with, Ryan. Your MightyBrand stands out in my mind as the worst sort of startup — you appeal not to a person with a single, concrete objective, but to somebody with a vacuous sense of what he's looking for online. I'm sure you have the best intentions, and I don't doubt your ability to make things, but I could never spend a part of my life developing tools just to let other people look at numbers online. It seems like such a pathetic goddamn endgame to me.
Useful? Useful's good. But useful isn't the end of the job, like Google routinely assumes it is. Once you've made something that people can use, your goal needs to be refinement. And Google's refinements are geared toward an unpleasant goal. As they've evolved they've become steadily uglier. My favorite things of theirs are the ones that add the least function, like the new fade-in on their homepage that adds simplicity without removing anything.
But I guess you don't know why breathtaking experiences are good. I guess you've spent your life in a gray box staring at the numbers and comments of people who as far as you're concerned aren't really people. You've never watched movies or read books or done anything that was enjoyable beyond simple utility. So you wouldn't understand why I think web developers need to learn how to create enjoyable, pleasant reactions from their designs. It would certainly explain MightyBrand's design.
"Useful is better than innovative."
No it's not. It's different. Some people like the one, other people like the other. I regret that so few people go for the latter, but I suppose, like you, they've this binary worldview wherein doing one thing your entire life maximizes some variables I'm not aware of.
Since you've seen fit to make this personal, care to drop the shroud of anonymity and tell us about all the deep, intensely meaningful things you've created or given the world? Otherwise, it would seem that you're just another cowardly troll who creates a throwaway account to sling shit. And how meaningful is that?
I mean, I'm in the minority here. I don't get along with the startup culture at all; I don't even feel comfortable with the concept of making a living offering a service per se to somebody. I think that my opinions have a certain merit, but they're opinions based on a shitload of varying philosophies and ideas and talents which don't translate well for everybody. But I like to offer them because I know there're certain people here who might benefit either from the ideas or from the resulting debate.
As for the anonymity: I don't feel comfortable being a known contributor to this place, for a variety of reasons. I read the stories here and I join in the discussions where I think my words might mean something, but I'm critical of the community and I don't want to be the person who spends his time fighting to change it. So, if it's all the same to you, I'll keep my name unspoken, and hope that I'm contributing enough that my writing here is seen as a valuable offering and not, as you'd claim, a cowardly troll.
(When things by me are posted here, plenty of anonymous users see fit to address me by name. So if that's what you're worried about, I'm sure you'll get your chance.)
Perhaps I'm biased because I've garnered more attention than a lot of people online. So I can say that I knows what it's like when half the Internet seems to be aware of your presence at once, and I know firsthand that it really does not feel good. Out of the dozens of thousands of people who have read and talked about what I've written, I've cared about perhaps seven or eight of them. If I only had sixteen people reading my work but they were all people having the exact reactions I wanted, I'd trade away the rest of the thousands. I suppose I'll give them to you.
We don't need rankings to prioritize activities, Marc. Ranking is merely one of a multitude of solutions that've been created for us. Twitter gives us things we're interested in but makes us actively find who we want to pay attention to. Many web sites have a board of editors that moderate things and give them a vision. Very few use ranking and ranking alone, and the ones that do face perhaps insurmountable challenges.
Hacker News is a prime instance of this. We don't have a civil community. Half the people on this thread are bitching about it, and a quarter more, like me, are bitching at the bitchers. One in six submissions are about how we don't like things, and one in thirty are about how we don't like those changes. But there's no practice about any of them, because Hacker News has taken the extreme route of not even placing faces on the moderators in charge. There's no Alexis of Reddit joking and being one of the guys. The only big name is that of Paul Graham, who likes writing things so succinct you'd imagine God said them. I miss the Paul Graham of decade-old message boards, who was fine with being insecure and immature and occasionally admitting he didn't know what was going on. This whole "Greek choir" attitude he assumes about him doesn't seem very friendly, nor does his instinct to hellban anybody who says anything he doesn't approve of, without any particularly clear policy.
But TechCrunch isn't like Google or Hacker News. It is an editor-controlled site. So it's a refutation to your own point. But it's a very, very bad web site. Michael Arrington, who I'm sure isn't as bad as some of us make him out to be, is nonetheless a poor writer and poorer editor. The best TC stories are merely breaking stories without comment; any attempts at journalism they make show themselves to really know less about their subject than any sophomore journalism student. (I must admit I'm sad that journalism is dying, not because I'll miss the papers but because I do suspect that most bloggers aren't aware of the writing and ethics policies established that made the best journalism so good.)
It's not evil. It is, however, pointless. When a seventeen-year-old flirts with CEOs and "spreads his name" and launches a pointless website that has a pointless merger and starts writing for a blog that's a fairly pointless title, then you have to wonder if the morals this community teaches aren't in fact somewhat wrongheaded. And we have our own members here who very publicly care less about writing good things and making good sites and more about pimping themselves out. Not everybody here is like that, but we tolerate those that are. I believe we ought to be a little more upfront about the autofellatio crowd, and let them know that as tasty as I suppose your own dick must be, you're only servicing yourself and not in the best way you could. There's more to be done. I want us to talk more about the more.
People want to be heard. People want to know others care about their opinion. That's how humans work. You can pretend to be above it, but you still just wrote 7 paragraphs arguing your point in the hope of other people reading and agreeing with you. That's not a bad thing. It's human.
I argue my point not for karma, but for the hope of changing the minds of bright people. My name will be forgotten after this, but if the idea I write about makes some people better, I consider myself satisfied.
PG has written at length about the social dynamics of high school from the perspective of a nerd. Are we now doomed to recreate the high school social dynamic within our community?
(For the record I don't really agree with the negative view of TC in that I think on balance they report more good than bad despite any personality quirks the founder might have)
If this was just about judging TC's trustworthiness, the discussion would stop at the point where the intern was dismissed and his posts removed. Shaming the intern publicly for his action is not about judging trustworthiness, it's about participating in a public stoning for the sheer pleasure of feeling holier-than-thou.
I honestly find it sickening. We work so hard to rise above the petty politics of BigCo, we try to distance ourselves from the bible-thumping anti-evolutionists, but when there's a little blood in the water suddenly everyone wants a piece of this kid.
I find it says a lot more about us than him that we spend so much time reviling him for corruption on the scale of a laptop while both of our economies are being systematically looted.
Why are nerd social politics so vicious? Because the stakes are so low.
Perhaps the message isn't that it's good to be vicious, but that maybe it's time to raise the stakes.
Very well said. I will ponder this. Your comment matters. Thanks.
I agree with the reply by ruabin but wanted to add one point on this. The fact that the intern was dismissed means next to nothing. If there is a question of trustworthiness here it's in the vetting process and overall integrity of the organization.
In other words the issue isn't the intern but the fact that there could be more like him.
It has nothing to do with his parents connections- Daniel met people by cold calling CEOs and other tech people when he was young (and cute). He made his connections by interviewing people when he was younger, and used these connections to intern at a few tech companies.
Daniel was definitely old enough to know what he was doing. The problem was he was so use to doing whatever he wanted in the tech community, he thought he had no boundaries. He reminds me of Richie Rich- he gets whatever he wants, his parents are never around (at least, not at tech events- every time I've met him, he's been traveling around SF alone), and he's always around older people.
Unfortunately, he's reached the point where he's no longer a cute young kid- and, he failed to adapt to his new situation. Hopefully, this will teach him to stop being a "smug little prick." And hopefully, he will recover from this.
There's a big difference between knowing whether what you're doing is frowned upon or not and appreciating the severity or consequences of same actions. Age certainly correlates with acquiring the latter.
I was a young writer in the dot com era.. and when I was 17 (or even 21!) I'd have known taking a kickback for a story was wrong. What I'm sure I wouldn't have appreciated, however, is how damaging taking a kickback could have been for my career/reputation/integrity and how much it violates the bonds of trust we form as adults.
It's a bit like toilet papering or egging someone's house. You know it's wrong as a kid, but it's not till you're mature that you appreciate how distressing it could be to the other parties involved. Empathy and a greater awareness of how your actions have consequences within a bigger ecosystem certainly comes with age.
However, given the fact that a good chunk of the post seems to be a rant about TC itself, I think it's worth pointing out who this is coming from. I've known Loren since the day I started at TechCrunch and think he's a funny, smart guy. But he's also spent a lot of time in the last few months ripping incessantly on TechCrunch.
That's sort of his thing — he's been ripping on Scoble and Dave Winer for years, but I suspect he gets a bit more attention when he does the TechCrunch bashing simply because there are quite a few people out there who love to hate TC. You can get a sense of this by looking through the archives of twitter.com/1938media. Maybe he's really had some epiphany about TC being evil after being friendly with us for years, maybe he's bitter about Michael failing to attend his conference, or maybe he's just doing his schtick.
It really isn't. In fact, "pointing out who this is coming from" is just a way of trying to discredit someone without actually addressing what they said.
In the end knowing who a person is can be used as a basis for choosing what to read but once you're actually reading the piece it doesn't really matter who is writing it or what their bias is unless they are misrepresenting the facts. If that's what he's doing you should point out what facts he's misrepresenting and not try to attack his character.
I don't care much for the petty politics of all of this, but I'm glad someone else feels the same way about Scoble. :)
I'm not sure what he advocates anyone else do about it, though. Seems more like a generalised attack on the world of tech reporting. That's cute, but what's the point?
A troll is someone who goes into other communities and tries to disrupt the conversation by being inflammatory. If you look at the very definition of the word troll it's "to circulate, move around". The imposition on other people is what makes trolling wrong
But he's posting on his own site and while his writing style is inflammatory that's to be expected from someone who represents himself as an entertainer.
It’s okay to call people idiots, or dopes, or morons, or liars when they are. This is part of the process of transparency."
No, it's not, that's called an insult, and it's generally bad form. It's only useful when it actually contributes to something, and I don't see how insulting people contributes to anything. Likely, this is what separates the people that actually know the "Stuff That Matters" and the people that act like they know.
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He's sorta the Perez Hilton of the tech world. He's well known, has lots of funny and extreme things to say, is funny, and "knows people" but it's hard to classify exactly what he's done. I still gotta love the guy though.