Latest Viral Craze: Ex-Staffers Bashing BuzzFeed on YouTube | Hacker News Reader

Latest Viral Craze: Ex-Staffers Bashing BuzzFeed on YouTube

variety.com

41 pointsjohn_mack24 comments

Granted, this submission is likely receiving a lot of upvotes because the headline contains the phrase "Bashing BuzzFeed", but the concerns echo submissions that tend to be important to HN, such as the rights of individual contractors/ownership of product. Although bashing your former employer is not a good long term strategy.

Disclosure: I am currently working on a "Why I Left Apple" blog post/video, albeit much different than the examples in the article.

Serious question - can someone please explain the purpose/appeal of these "Why I Left X" blog posts/videos?

I'm from a generation where you didn't publicize this kind of stuff, and I'm not quite sure I understand the intent/social value of such posts/videos outside of the "whistleblowing" types of posts. Absent of any context, these posts/videos just strike me as self promotion.

> I'm from a generation where you didn't publicize this kind of stuff

Which is incidentally the exact reason why the posts are popular. There has been a taboo on hiring/firing literature, and only recently have people become more transparent with information that is very valuable. Having unique perspectives makes you stand out, although admittingly in the case of posts which make it to the top of HN, it's often the interview-from-hell from a Big 4 or a "my incredible journey" exit. (both of which are tropes that are not applicable in my blog post)

Self-promotion is exactly what they're contextualized as in the article. These are aspiring entertainment media personalities.

edit: Unless you meant solely gp's context of an engineer posting about a similar topic. I defer on that, I was talking about the BuzzFeed employees.

I think it's self promotion in both cases. A lot of people who put out these articles on how bad their working conditions were seem to be trying to turn their woes into a z-list internet celebrity lifestyle. They want to turn the controversy from these 'leaving' articles and videos into a larger social media presence and montly Patreon bucks.

Look at that woman who got fired after complaining about the conditions at Yelp for example. She tried to turn the situation into a personal brand.

It's the internet version of people that try and become Z-list celebrities through reality TV shows.

Because blogging and publishing videos is easier than ever. Nothing has changed about the culture.

In 1972, if someone left a company, they would willingly tell anybody who cared to ask. It is a frequent question during the interview process because it is insanely useful in helping to understand a potential hire. You didn't publicize this kind of stuff because the effort of typing it and Xeroxing it for your zine wasn't worth the reward of a reader getting some sort of insight into the company culture.

But now publishing that thought requires almost no effort beyond just typing it or saying it. That's it. It's just a personal story.

>> You didn't publicize this kind of stuff because the effort of typing it and Xeroxing it for your zine wasn't worth the reward of a reader getting some sort of insight into the company culture.

At least for my cohort, that's not the reason why you didn't do it. You didn't do it because it was career limiting. There was value placed on a person who had a sense of discretion.

I'm sure a lot of HR types Google their candidates. I'm wondering if any would drop a candidate for having posted these things.

And this is why it is interesting: the fact that someone is putting their name to something that could seriously damage their future career potential. It is ironic that you dismiss this as self-promotion -- of course it is -- and then point out that it could be career-limiting.

It was considered career limiting for my generation. Don't know if it still is now, or if the younger generations simply don't care.

Outside of the "Why I Left" posts, a lot of younger people put a lot of content on social media that my age peer group would consider "career limiting".

I think you have to see it in a technological context, as in, what does technology enable people to do that it didn't during your generation? Because it's very likely your generation would be doing the same thing had your younger years experienced the same kind of technological enabling.

Napster and LimeWire were big in my younger years and it allowed kids to illicitly amass music collections beyond what most middle-income kids could in a previous generation. Does that mean my generation were inherently more appreciative of music and/or more unethical, had Internet file-sharing never come to pass?

>> Napster and LimeWire were big in my younger years and it allowed kids to illicitly amass music collections beyond what most middle-income kids could in a previous generation. Does that mean my generation were inherently more appreciative of music and/or more unethical, had Internet file-sharing never come to pass?

The only thing that Napster and Limewire did was to allow you to get more faster. You guys were no worse than my generation who shared vinyl and recorded "personal copies" onto cassette tapes.

When I was young, schools used your "permanent record" as a scare tactic. Having a black mark on your school record could prevent you from getting certain jobs (the one example cited by my high school principal was getting into the police academy). This stuff would get laughed at today.

On the other hand, today's version of your "permanent record" (i.e., anything you've said or done online) is broader in scope and for the most part, available to everyone. While it seems like everyone is aware of the potential consequences, it also seems like people are also less concerned about them as well. I'm just amazed at some of the stuff I see on sites that use Facebook comments where everyone is pretty much posting with their real name.

I guess it depends on the nature of why you left. For instance: I would not post such a thing (or at least I would do so anonymously) if I had a very negative experience with a company.

However, if the reason I left was simply one of cultural differences, or some other not-quite-a-fit scenario, I would certainly have no qualms attaching my name to it. Like I said, that's often something you're asked about in an interview anyway.

> these posts/videos just strike me as self promotion

Vanity blogging and self promotion seem to be inevitable side effects of the frictionless nature of publishing on the internet and the lack of will or resources to do thorough moderation on aggregators with public contribution.

Pretty interesting dynamic. As someone pointed out, these people are hired by BuzzFeed for their ability to be creative thinkers/creators who show aptitude in drawing attention to themselves. These are precisely the kind of people who would do something viral like this after quitting the company. As someone else noted, this kind of public airing is usually career-limiting, but it's different with BuzzFeed in that many industry folks tend to have disdain for BF, so publicly dissing BF might have less of a negative connotation depending on the nature of the complaint.

When I saw this headline, I immediately thought of Mark Duffy's rant in Gaeker: http://gawker.com/top-10-best-ever-wtf-omg-reasons-buzzfeed-...

I was surprised to see that BF apparently has such strong constraints on creative's side projects. That policy apparently doesn't apply to the investigative journalism team, where reporters seem to have free reign to open source their work and share their data.

This article is more interesting than its title suggests. You think it'll be a schadenfreude-filled dish on problems with buzzfeed but no:

1. BF trains people to go for eye-catching content and personalities, so as people leave in the normal course of events they call attention to their departure as a way of helping their own career.

2. BF basically doesn't come off as a bad place and indeed seems to be teaching these people to do, well, item #1.

Clickbait header opportunity missed :( Of all places, where that would be legitimate...

It seems to me a lot of these ex-BuzzFeed video producers just leave the company once they become super popular and want "more independence."

It seems like they're publicly biting the hand that fed them by making these videos: If BuzzFeed never hired them in the first place, they'd all just be no-name YouTubers.

I want to know how much these people get paid. The content industry needs some transparency. Especially after that horrible stain on professionalism Huffington Post paid its writers nothing and Ariana got $315 million. Exploitation is not cool, nor is kneecapping the real market.

The Chubbs parody video[0] is very funny and spot on.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPjPPuA0ERg

An angle this article is kind of vague on that could potentially be of interest to HN readers would be how many of these people's relationship to BuzzFeed was through a new-ish L.A.-based video unit of theirs, BuzzFeed Motion Pictures.

BuzzFeed Motion Pictures was launched in 2014 with a big splash and a $50 million investment from Andreessen Horowitz (http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/buzzfeed-raises-50-mil...). It's led by viral content pioneer Ze Frank (http://allthingsd.com/20120914/buzzfeed-hires-web-video-pion...).

Frank has characterized the unit's approach to content creation as "cheap and fast" (http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-buzzfeed-studios-20150...), and they got in a fair bit of hot water last year after firing two on-camera personalities for appearing in a non-BuzzFeed video (http://www.politico.com/media/story/2016/06/non-compete-agre...), with Frank then warning remaining staff that "you cannot work on personal projects outside of BuzzFeed that impact your ability to work for us" (http://adage.com/article/media/ze-frank-buzzfeed-motion-pict..., https://www.buzzfeed.com/zefrank/being-a-part-of-buzzfeed-mo...).

All of which makes the place sound a bit like a video sweatshop that makes its money by grinding up talented young people and then spitting them out, so it would be interesting to know how many of the complaints in this article are from people who worked at BuzzFeed in general versus how many are from people who worked at BuzzFeed Motion Pictures.

Half the people who make these videos still actually work for buzzfeed.

This just confirmed my dinosaur status. I had no idea what BF did or that a video factory existed to such an extent.

Don't despair, I still go to YouTube to see how to fix things.

This is just about impossible to read on mobile. Pop up ads everywhere.

Only slightly better on desktop, with a video player (for unrelated content) cycling adds, and then moving down the right hand of the screen when you scroll away from it.

The web is broken. Sigh.

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