Born This Way

Once upon a time, TechCrunch was about start-ups and gosh they were killing it. I miss those days! Anyone else?

That said, I'm assuming their change in direction over the years has been a business decision. I will always respect that even if it means less TC for me.

It's been my not-so-private view for some time now Arrington has consciously turned into a professional troll. While TC had great value a few years back as a news source, the purchase by AOL was IMO the culmination of a steady decline.

I'm not sure if the instigation of flamebait headlines and Gawker level journalism were a natural progression for an expanding media outlet which bases its own self worth on impressions and ad-clicks, or a conscious effort to court the attentions of the big-name acquisitors, but the Techcrunch of 2010 was a noticeable step down from the startup/business related organ of prior years.

Viral content spreading via limited-char media such as Twitter is probably encouraging the troll-headline ("Women don't want to run startups"). We know from the AOL Way missives that the major content farms are encouraging Google-Trend following made-to-order 'reporting' rather than seeking out the new. As TC became the go-to place for 'launch' it has become apparent that cronyism was driving much of the content selection, rather than objective assessment of the startup in question - see Quora vs StackOverflow reporting on TC in recent months.

There was a post a few weeks back on HN of someone wanting to produce a successor to TC - a 'back to the old way' site. Whether they will be successful or not, the interesting fact was the public response was overwhelmingly positive, rather than questioning the rationality of pursuing the idea. At the end of the day, it's just a blog. Crunchbase is great, Disrupt is valuable, but if the anchoring blog loses its way, the associated properties will be usurped by someone else.

I've seen a lot of bad writing online, even in reputable publications. But I've never seen ANYONE taunt their readers in comments like Steve Gillmor is doing now.

And I can say something like this since I'm the type of person that spends my weekends reading news and articles.

On the Business Insider, when readers ridicule Henry Blodget about his past, he responds politely with links and explanations about the accusations against him.

Relevant comment from the article -

This seems to be a textbook "AOL Way" article that Paul Miller was talking about.

Beatles? Popular.

iPad? Popular (Bonus points for featuring FOUR of them).

Lady Gaga? Popular.

Turnaround time? Few minutes.

Actual substance? None whatsoever.

Steve Gilmor's unrelenting jackassery is getting out of hand. Now that TC is under new management, can someone rein this guy in?

Heh. They can't all be winners can they? Based on this article, I'd say they jumped it, hired it, and now its writing articles for them.

I realize that "star" contributors can command more control (and once upon a time, higher freelance fees) but I am very surprised a TC editor didn't exercise veto power over this post. It brings down the brand.

In addition, Gillmor's childish comments are positively embarrassing, and go against the spirit of Techcrunch's own comment policy, which states "please think of the comments as a conversation between individuals and interact with civility." (http://techcrunch.com/techcrunch-comment-policy/)

Good for Arrington that AOL bought them when they were turning to garbage. Bad for AOL that they didn't see it coming.

I wonder why anyone even reads TC these days.

I have always found Gillmor's writing absolutely impenetrable. His posts meander and never seem to arrive at anything resembling a point. I almost feel like he intentionally avoids making points.

Maybe it is less that they jumped the shark and more that they tried and missed, thus being eaten alive by the shark.

Or they really believe that writing about anything is better than writing nothing.

OoTheNigerian: what's your real name?

That aside: Wow. I thought this would link to an article that might have a flaw or two or was not 'acceptable' from some cutting edge geek snob POV. (Sorry for expecting something along these lines on HN, I am new around here!)

But this is really the absolutely worst article I have ever seen on a tech-related site - including sites that never even had any 'rep' for a start, as opposed to TechCrunch - plus the author is definitely being mad creepy in the comments.

>Now it’s Sunday morning and I’m ten minutes past my deadline.

And now we know why.

Eh, it is just what happens when a tech site reaches a certain point of popularity. In the early days, a site fights to be unique and high quality to get the hits. Once a certain level of hits is assured, there is a weird switch where since every post is going have a certain number of views, the writers start to care less about quality and get into a feedback loop that tells them they still are doing well cause they are getting hits. And even worse, the outliers like Steve's strange ramblings and MG's flamebait are seen as better cause the novelty drives more attention to them than a normal, well researched and written post.

I still find it entertaining, but you just can't take it seriously. It is probably best if you never do.

No, they haven't jumped the shark. You were just exposed to Steve Gillmor's writing. While the article is pointless, its one of his more coherent posts. He has written much worse TC articles than this.

What the hell was that? I'm sorry for the bluntness of my statement, but that "article" was crap.

I think it is just weak writing, the story seems to be about new technology and how we interact with it, which is fair TechCrunch fodder. However the opening sentences provide no hook and no solid message as to what the article is about. On top of that the writing style is something out of a Sunday magazine, rambling, relaxed and undirected.

Though it was posted on Sunday so . . .

TC writes whatever will generate ad impressions or curry favor with someone they wish would like them, and AOL's acquisition makes that official policy.

I really hope the guys at http://thestartupfoundry.com/ keep at it and become a significant presence.

Their feedburner subscribers count has reduced to half of what it was few months ago. (4000k to 2000k).

No, they haven't jumped the shark. Happy Days started to suck long before Fonzie jumped the shark tank. That episode was just the final straw. TechCrunch isn't that bad - as long as you pick and choose which articles to read. If you're wasting time reading every TechCrunch article linked to by HN, then you have bigger concerns than whether the articles are consistently high quality.

Maybe HN article submitters could do us a favor and bracket the author's name in the title for those of us that have biases for or against certain writers at TC, NYT, etc.

I only started reading tc about a year ago and even in this amount of time I've seen the downturn. Steve and alexytosis(whatever) both write meaningless dribble.

He seems to have taken the opening paragraphs for several iPad articles and squished them together.

Maybe it's an experiment in creating articles out of scraps.

Hardly news. Everything that need be said about TC was covered years ago in Giles Bowkett's post: http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2008/05/never-hate-only-eve...

It's not Techcrunch, it's Steve Gillmore. I'd say he'd jumped the shark, but that would imply at once point he actually said something sensible.

Why does snarky title editorializing have this many upvotes? Do we really want this showing up on the front page of HN every time someone reads a TechCrunch post they dislike?

Steve Gillmor is nothing but himself - love him or hate him, his writing style hasn't changed. There's nothing new here to complain about.

Long time ago. Probably 2008.

I am pretty sure most people are submitting techcrunch articles just for karma points. That and they come standard with aggressive linkbaiting headlines.

Steve Gillmor is a child. The last article I read by him, he was stalking and creeping on people in the comments. It was very, very weird and the comments on this article seem to imply that he's at it again.

Seriously, I don't care for TC, but they need to get this jackass under control. After mentioning that he was responding immaturely to commenters, he replied with "What is your real name?".

http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/13/close-or-view/#comment-1458...

One word: pageviews.

Guys, TC is a tech site right? Than why do they not validate the email when you want to comment? Epic FAIL!

I don't know if you folks are aware of this but Steve Gillmor in his previous career was a record producer — he worked with everyone from Firesign Theater to Grace Jones. That's why is writing is so filled with references to music. You can say what you want about Techcrunch but Gillmor is one of the writers they have who is still worth reading. He doesn't give a damn about chasing page views and if you read in between the lines he often has something interesting to say. And his charm is that he doesn't give a damn about the trolls in the comments section.

Also each generation of technology has its publication: In a sense if Techcrunch is feeling dated it's because we're entering a new era. Once upon a time in the web 1.0 era we were reading Slashdot, F*cked Company, InfoWorld, MacWeek, the Silicon Alley Reporter a few others that are pretty much non-existent today. If Techcrunch is now dead so is Web 2.0 in a sense (and other brands of that era like SXSW, Mashable, etc.).