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Comment by filleokus | Hacker News Reader

OT: Recently quite a few really great articles by The Information have surfaced at HN. Probably because of the generous "unlocking" of otherwise pay-walled content. Per [0] they are apparently self-financed:

> Unlike most other news sites, we don’t have venture capital or corporate owners. I own the publication.

Although their stories provide high value information to high value individuals / decision makers [1], I feel genuinely happy to see an example of a new good quality original journalistic platform surviving. Or perhaps even thriving.

[0]: https://www.theinformation.com/about [1]: Compared to stuff like investigative local news where the monetary value of a single story is so much lower, but perhaps requiring similar amounts of journalistic effort.

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This is a well-written article, and I do love good journalism. But I am personally skeptical of The Information, because the person who owns it is literally in bed with a founder/VC: https://www.theinformation.com/reporters/sam-lessin

My skepticism is compounded by the fact that his startup repeatedly spammed me at an address I give only to friends, and I definitely never gave to him. I presume he pulled it out some mutual friend's address book when they signed up for his startup. But despite many rounds of discussion, they'd never tell me how they got that address. And after all that discussion, he then started spamming it from his VC fund.

That dude is kind of the worst.

A few years ago, I found out that Connectifier[1] is one way this happens. That company seems to mine data in some sort of questionable manner and then distributes it to recruiters. It's now owned by Microsoft.

I discovered it because they had my phone number and also had it confused with an ex-co-worker. After receiving several calls for that person, a recruiter finally told me what tool they were using. Connectifier did seem remove my (and their) information when I asked.

[1] - https://www.connectifier.com

Just file a GDPR request

Can I do that as an American?

They were funded almost entirely by Sam Lessin, the husband of the founder, and his Facebook money. There is a massive conflict of interest there which they can conveniently avoid disclosing because it’s all arms-length.

I was surprised nobody brought that up when they were the main source of negative press about Snap. But, keep this in mind when you’re reading material from The Information — it’s the publication of choice for the retired members of the Facebook Mafia.

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