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Comment by mwexler | Hacker News Reader

This is another "Forbes Contributor" post. This means that it's just a blog post, though, admittedly, Cohan is a smart guy.

Does anyone else think Forbes should do more to separate volunteer content from editorially directed and reviewed journalistic content? Or is this just a moot point since folks don't trust "Forbes" as a brand?

It feels like, to me, someone saying "I went to Stanford" in a conversation because they walked on the campus. Just because Forbes hosts the content doesn't mean it's at the same quality as a true Forbes spawned story.

Since the Forbes.com front page appears to now be almost 3/4 contributors, I guess it's working for them. Still feels wrong.

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I typically ignore things on Forbes for this reason. In this case, Mr. Cohan works in venture capital for SoFi (according to his Twitter bio) and it's not immediately clear if he has a stake in any of these companies or why he's taking a shot at Tableau other than for the clickbait. It would be nice to know whether his current employer has any material stake in either company before reading. I understand he is also a business school professor but I would expect a disclaimer for an article like this.

> Or is this just a moot point since folks don't trust "Forbes" as a brand?

That's the stage I've been in for a while now. Forbes.com now has the same value to me as Huffington Post or Inc.com. It's a content mill with no clear brand voice that anyone can write for.

Forbes is cashing in their brand name, built over a long period of time, for quick wins. It's sad that they don't value their legacy.

Over the long term, this will destroy their brand. I don't take forbes.com any more seriously than I do medium.com, and I doubt I'm alone in that.

Yeah I tend to ignore Contributor "articles" such as these, they are so one sided, and seem more like an ad than anything else.

There is a really big metric on their dashboard, "Pageviews", and this is a best of all worlds solution (cheaper, more content, diverse content, diverse authors promoting their content, forbes.com SEO juice, etc).

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