Silicon Valley Elite Discuss Journalists Having Too Much Power in Private App | Hacker News Reader

Silicon Valley Elite Discuss Journalists Having Too Much Power in Private App

vice.com

74 pointszdw80 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23718317

If ever there was a one sided article, it was this. Doesn't even talk about the nuances of the problems. Journalists are like how dare tech people are criticizing us - but it is totally ok to do it the other way round. The difference now though is, because of social media, prominent tech personalities have much bigger audiences.

Sometimes I am thankful like services like Twitter and Facebook exists since these types of biases are for everyone to see and make independent calls on. Before, it would have been like whatever NYTimes said would be taken as the truth as there would have been no platform available to present your pov.

Yeah, I even started reading this one with an uncritical eye but the resentment just seeps through. There's even an aside where the author just has to provide this parenthetical counterargument to the accusation that journalists seek clicks... right there in a supposed news story, a whole paragraph of editorial argument.

It really wasn't very useful even to tease out whatever issues were supposedly being discussed.

ISTM that the article is very explicitly taking sides; it doesn't even claim to be providing some neutral view of the controversy, it just advances the journalists' own point of view. A biased article will always get more clicks.

If I took what Facebook presents to me through my feed as a news source to influence my POV, I might believe that Obama is a secret Muslim, or that Trump was done away with years ago, and is instead an alien, or that Helen Hunt, the actress, is involved in international child trafficking, or perhaps that COVID-19 was put in place to control the world's population. In my experience, all Facebook does is reveal and feed upon people's worst needs, desires, fears. I'll take the NY Times over this any day of the week.

It's not like the NYTs doesn't have a history of spreading unfounded 'conspiracy theories' too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraqi_aluminum_tubes#September...

In terms of damage done to society, I think all the examples you list combined still pale in comparison to that single example.

Perhaps. The NYT is one source published daily. Facebook has millions of conversations happening among friends and loose connections happening daily about supposed conspiracy theories. I propose that the scale that results from the viral nature of this distribution dwarfs what the NYT could possibly do.

> On Wednesday night, the topic of conversation was Lorenz herself, who had been listening earlier in the conversation but left partway through. After she left, the participants began discussing whether Lorenz was playing "the woman card" when speaking out about her harassment following a Twitter altercation with Srinivasan.

> "You can't fucking hit somebody, attack them and just say, 'Hey, I have ovaries and therefore, you can't fight back,'" Felicia Horowitz, founder of the Horowitz Family Foundation and wife of Andreessen Horowitz cofounder Ben Horowitz, said.

[...]

> "Is Taylor afraid of a brown man on the street? Then she shouldn't be afraid of a brown man in Clubhouse," Srinivasan said. "I have literally done nothing other than one previous tweet. Number one, right? So the whole, you know, talking about tweeting as you know, harassment—completely illegitimate, completely wrong, completely fabricated and just false."

[...]

> "When it comes to our industry, there’s a really, really toxic dynamic that exists right now," Nait Jones, an Andreessen Horowitz VC, said on the call while speaking about recent reports about abuse in the tech industry. "Because those stories were so popular and drove so much traffic, they also created a market for more of those stories. They created a pressure on many reporters to find the next one of those stories inside of a fast growing tech company because those stories play very well on Twitter, especially around protecting vulnerable people."

1. The lack of self awareness is incredible.

2. What happened to us? Were people always this nasty and identitarian?

I fail to see how any of the quotes you provided are nasty or lack self-awareness.

(capital M, T) Me Too

1. Yes

2. Yes

Answers to both your questions requires self-introspection and experience with diversity of people from all levels, so will go wooosh over most people's heads, or they will bin it as "sort of PC".

We're being given a mirror that creates what we see in it.

Yes, this effectively perpetuates crisis.

> The lack of self awareness is incredible.

I mostly agree that journalism is an overwhelmingly toxic profession.

1.) In all fairness, those are two different people making those statements. It lacks a certain self-awareness I agree, but it's not to the same degree if it had been the same person.

2.) I genuinely believe it's due to social media. Twitter specifically is very divisive and that's where most journalists gather. The feedback loops are too rewarding. You call out a "tech bro" for saying something racist and you're rewarded with thousands of likes and retweets. It drives people to seek that out at all costs.

Do you mean the lack of self awareness on the part of Vice? I thought the third quote could have been something out of The Onion.

Breaking news! VCs disparage outrage driven click bait. Click to read more...

In Silicon Valley, this is how it's always been. Just hidden. It's like this in the finance industry as a whole as well.

This article is missing some of the critical context that lead to this from Twitter.

Summarized here: https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-July-2020-Twitter-spat-bet...

I think Taylor comes across extremely negatively here and the spin in this Vice article just makes it worse.

Basically Taylor puts up a mean tweet about the Away CEO’s comments on the media (without actually engaging in the content of those comments).

Balaji responds to the tweet with the same wording Taylor used, but directed at Taylor herself (to point out the meanness).

Taylor tweets a cropped response image of only Balaji’s response and plays victim, rallying media people behind her (things escalate) - eventually they surreptitiously record this clubhouse conversation and write a hit piece without taking any responsibility for anything.

It’s all very high school and the journalists come across extremely negatively to me. If anything this proves Balaji’s point.

I should spend less time on Twitter.

The Quora piece contains a lot of conjecture on the part of the author, who clearly has an ax to grind with the media. If you don't believe the conspiracy that "the Verge media outlet is specifically targeting female founders" the argument completely falls apart.

If you read the original Away article, Korey clearly crossed multiple lines and was creating a toxic work environment. As a tech worker, I think its right and good for people covering tech to "call out" this sort of revisionist history.

I don’t disagree that the original Away article showed bad behavior.

Both things can be true though, the slack messages/toxic environment from Korey in that first article can be bad and it can be wrong for Taylor to mean tweet without addressing the content of any of Korey’s points about the media (which are valid), and everything Lorenz did to escalate and mislead from there can be wrong too.

For clarity the media comments Korey wrote that kicked this recent thing off are separate from that original article.

I have even less confidence that the original Away article is entirely true now given the journalist behavior around this second issue.

I'm unsure how the supposed bad behavior on Taylor's part reduces your confidence in the original Away article, which was written by a completely separate journalist, but I'm sure you have a good reason to make such an inference.

I fundamentally believe we are approaching this incident from fundamentally different perspectives. I saw Taylor's original tweet as a form of "correcting the record" in response to Korey's obvious spin on the whole thing, rather than trying to open a debate on media-tech relations (which is what it became ultimately due to Balaji's derailment). It's unfortunate that Taylor's tweet contained incorrect information on Korey's current job status, but that appeared to be a minor issue to me, but in other contexts could be construed as "misleading". You seem to be of the perspective that this incident is a symptom of a larger, systemic issue in journalism, an issue I have a lot of sympathy towards, so by all means go off.

I think Taylor could have engaged directly on the content of what Steph said, as well as point out the context from the previous article that could be a potential cause of motivated reasoning to keep in mind when considering Steph’s arguments.

That would have been professional and reasonable.

The tweet Taylor wrote was neither of those things and proved Korey’s point more than if Taylor had said nothing.

This article is a great example of the phenomenon being discussed. The article intentionally misleads the reader and distorts statements. For example, look at the selective omission from Nait Jones statement. They were clearly trying to portray him as categorically opposed to journalists reporting on abuse.

>"When it comes to our industry, there’s a really, really toxic dynamic that exists right now,"

Next sentence omitted: There were very very impactfull stories about abuse inside fast growing tech companies, that proved to be very valuable stories, that stopped that abuse from happening.

>"Because those stories were so popular and drove so much traffic, they also created a market for more of those stories. They created a pressure on many reporters to find the next one of those stories inside of a fast growing tech company because those stories play very well on Twitter, especially around protecting vulnerable people."

Every VC nerd tweeting about Clubhouse reminds me of the Robert Scoble influencer strategy for the Google Glass.

This is one of the best takes I've seen. Ahh....Scoble....I remember those days.

I think the peek was an episode essentially about cut-and-paste and on the web which had something to do with Ray Ozzie on the Gilmore Gang.

Its only fun to have an exclusive hangout that doesn't let in the unwashed masses if you can brag to the unwashed masses.

The writer of this article is a journalist, so the portrayal may be less than fair.

That being said, and speaking generally (not about VCs or rich people in particular), something is going terribly wrong when a private person can be publicly shamed in the press 15 years from now for doing something that is completely normal and socially acceptable today, and lose their job as a result.

> a private person can be publicly shamed in the press 15 years from now for doing something that is completely normal and socially acceptable today

This industry created the tools which made it feasible. Before social media, most people simply didn't have a public record of things they said years ago. This industry also created the platforms on which this sort of behavior flourishes. Journalists may have some bad habits, but the tech industry gave them nuclear weapons.

Good point. But it takes a journalist with a specific purpose in mind, and a public that cares to be outraged in the first place about private people whose specific past behaviors have no bearing on history, to dig back into the past and bring such stuff out into the public eye, with specific names and dates attached.

I suspect such journalists have always existed and there's always been an appetite for bad journalism. Bad journalism certainly isn't new; for instance in the 19th century shitty newspapers started the Spanish-American War basically for shits and giggles. They were able to do that because much of the American public enthusiastically gobbled up the nonsense yellow journalists were publishing.

I think many of the tools the tech industry has created in past years, social media and link aggregators using content recommendation systems, have thrown fuel into the dumpster fire. These tools and systems of incentives have facilitated and encouraged shitty journalism. When the tech industry itself is then the victim of this, it's sort of karmic justice. Hoisted by their own petard, as it were. But all to often the victims have nothing to do with the tech industry. Most victims are, as you say, private people; technology has made private people vulnerable to unscrupulous journalists in a way that seems historically unprecedented.

So as long as you do bad shit and get away with it for 15 years no one should judge you for it?

Not what the OP said. Even the US constitution recognizes that Ex post facto laws are bad and specifically prohibits their passage.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_post_facto_law#United_State...

The law isn't social or corporate.

It's funny this community supports separation of politics and workplace until it could possibly effect them negatively. I don't care how long it's been since you were in the KKK or sexually harassed your EA even if it was "socially acceptable at the time", I don't ever want to work with you.

Journalism’s purpose is to report current and past events that have a bearing on history — both political and social.

You may not want to work with a former KKK member, but that doesn’t mean the press (or anyone) has any business exposing their sins in public, unless there are specific crimes for which penal justice has yet to be served—and even then, a wise journalist would do well to contact the DA instead of publishing first.

Beyond that, I would remark that “love your neighbor as yourself” does include personal and social forgiveness of past wrongs: “He who covers an offense promotes love.” But an unforgiving society is brittle and prone to collapse into totalitarianism.

> Journalism’s purpose is to report current and past events that have a bearing on history — both political and social.

No, it's not. Journalism serves the current public interest, not history, except insofar as the latter serves the former.

> You may not want to work with a former KKK member, but that doesn’t mean the press (or anyone) has any business exposing their sins in public, unless there are specific crimes for which penal justice has yet to be served.

The scope of the public interest isn't limited to crimes, that's a ludicrous idea. Heck, that's not even consistent with your earlier claim about the relationship between journalism and history, as the interest of history is much broader than crimes.

> Journalism serves the current public interest, not history

Thanks. I think my idea was a sort of "idealized journalism". I'll accept your correction.

> The scope of the public interest isn't limited to crimes, that's a ludicrous idea.

I didn't say that. If you can think of another reason for publishing specific activities of private individuals from years ago that serves the public interest—as we agree is journalism's purpose—by all means share it. I could only think of one reason; perhaps there are others.

Generally, naming and shaming private individuals for specific non-criminal acts in the past does not serve the public interest; that's my point. The only interest it serves is that of the mob, or that of a totalitarian government, both of which we will find it harder to avoid the more we tolerate this type of journalism. This is not how a healthy, free society behaves.

>If you can think of another reason for publishing specific activities of private individuals from years ago that serves the public interest

Donald Trump's history of sexual harassment. I don't want a womanizer to be President, even if it was socially acceptable to do a bunch of coke and fuck your EA or teenagers at the time.

Donald Trump is a public figure. My above points concern private individuals.

Replace Donald Trump with my coworkers or boss or CEO.

Yeah, that's where it firmly crosses the line regarding public interest. Whatever we allow to be done to others can just as well happen to us. Never forget:

    First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
     Because I was not a socialist.

    Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
     Because I was not a trade unionist.

    Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
     Because I was not a Jew.

    Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

This isn't about public interest. This isn't the law. This isn't the government.

This is my (or my company's) interest. You can't tell me who I have to interact with. You are free to speech, but you are not free from consequences. If you're an asshole, people aren't going to want to hang out with you.

And personally, I don't want people who sexually harass or rape their EAs near me or in public office. I don't want people who grab women by the pussy to be my boss or my peer or my employee. That's my choice.

That is your choice, but journalists must be held to a higher standard regarding what they publish about past events concerning private persons—that’s the subject of this thread.

Journalists should be held to a higher standard in the context of whether the content they journal is fact or fiction. As long as they are not committing libel, I want to know if private people are abusers, even if it falls within the law.

There should not be a statute of limitations on truth.

This is primarily talking about actions that are normal and socially acceptable today (or in the time in which they took place). Abuse does not fit that category.

> Even the US constitution recognizes that Ex post facto laws are bad and specifically prohibits their passage.

Ex post facto is a term of art in criminal law; and the prohibition has everything to do with the type of consequences that are uniquely applied in the criminal context.

It does not reflect a general rule that there is no liability for wrongs determined after-the-fact, but is a special exception to the general rule that such liability is acceptable.

Yes, but it is a recognition that there is a certain general unfairness to holding someone to account for something which society found perfectly fine at the time it took place only to be made wrong after the fact.

I think you missed a critical part of the post you are responding to.

>...for doing something that is completely normal and socially acceptable

The question has to do with the growing application of moral presentism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presentism_(literary_and_histo...

The kind of journalism that these people do is dead as a professional information-delivery job because it is outcompeted by obsessive bloggers since the advent of the ubiquitous Internet. It is an entertainment business and behaves like an entertainment business, which means that the participants are incentivized to create buzz, etc.

If your news sources are primarily these, then you’re missing out on a lot of actionable information. All that stuff is now in private conversations because the general audience is gotcha-obsessed. P

> The kind of journalism that these people do is dead as a professional information-delivery job because it is outcompeted by obsessive bloggers since the advent of the ubiquitous Internet.

Eh, not so much. That's not much different than saying that journalism has been out-competed by the Facebook News Feed. It might be true that they've "outcompeted" journalism by pulling the rug out from under its revenue model, but they certainly haven't out-competed it from an information-delivery perspective.

Blogs/social media is full of grossly unreliable information, for the most part due to the lack of professional journalistic standards. If they're amateur, then they have greatly reduced coverage due to lack of time and experience. If they're professional, then they've either recreated traditional journalism (with all the same difficulties) or they exist explicitly as PR to push some agenda. I'm reminded of the hordes or mattress review blogs that are mostly owned by or tacking kickbacks from some mattress company or other (see https://www.fastcompany.com/3065928/sleepopolis-casper-blogg...).

The idea that blogs could replace journalism is a dated, idealistic, early-00s idea. The best they ever managed to consistently do was to was replicate the hot air of the opinion pages. Sure, occasionally amateur blog gets a scoop, but they're relatively few and far between, separated by chasms of noise.

In the following sentence from my original post, I intended for the (now) highlighted section to have semantic significance:

> he kind of journalism that these people do

One thing I noticed when browsing the twitter thread where Taylor Lorenz tweeted about Balaji Srinivasan was the consistency of responses. Every single response from a verified journalist defended Lorenz and condemned the Srinivasan tweet, and every single response from a tech person defended Srinivasan and pointed to Lorenzs own tweet about Stephanie Korey.

As far as I saw, neither side engaged with the other's arguments, and the battle lines were drawn with remarkable consistency.

The fact that they arent even aware of the contradiction of saying that it's journalists who have too much power while complaining that someone is powerless because they don't have a lot of social media followers or that journalists are driven by the need to go viral on social media is scary to say the least.

I didn't really see that. For example, DHH was extremely critical of Balaji's shenanigans. It seemed like rationalist twitter (most likely due to the anti-NYT sentiment relating to the SSC drama) + some VCs vs the rest of Online Twitter. Taylor's beat is usually of the more liminal variety rather than red meat, culture war content, so this whole situation feels like the result of misplaced animosity.

DHH has always been against the VC culture.

This is just people having conversations about protecting their interest. I'm sure if we spied on the "non-elite" people talking to their spouses or friends, there will be some controversial stuff.

I don't even think there's anything controversial here. This is just a fluff article.

Meh.

"Powerful people complain about journalists. –News at 11"

This has been going on since the day the first broadsheets were written in cuneiform.

What matters, is what people do, when it comes to stuff like this. I'd say the Ebay folks, sending the bloggers pig's head masks was more alarming.

“Never argue with a man who buys ink by the barrel.” –Mark Twain

Flagged for petty bickering. I don't understand why people post and upvote chatter they would be downvoted to oblivion if it were posted as comments on HN. We can do better.

This article employs the same malicious cropping Taylor Lorenz did that made people so mad. I think the origin story is not that she complained about the CEO of Away, it was that when Balaji copied her exact wording, she cropped out the origin picture that showed this and claimed harassment.

Journalists seem incredibly tone deaf -- do they ever wonder why people dislike them? It's because they employ so many subtle lies like this all the time.

Journalists really need to get off twitter - it ruins their credibility. If this is how they act for some crap drama, it calls into question all sorts of 'important' articles and op-eds

Dumb piece about a dumb conversation. But for the record, journalists gain trust & responsibility by keeping their opinions out of it. If you give free rein to your silly opinions, all you do is gain the blind obedience of those who already agree with you, which is easy. Easy. And is the default mode on Twitter, i.e. the "mooks and knights" model - https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2020/01/16/the-internet-of-beefs/

Those who want to be treated with respect like real grown-up journalists need to act like real grown-up journalists and not just common Twitter trash. What am I supposed to do with something like "Silicon Valley millionaires, who have been coddled..."? If I'm looking to be outraged and join a mob, I'm all good, I've reached my destination. If on the other hand I'm looking for facts/journalism, what should I do at this point? Ask for a source? Where was the coddling? Who did the coddling? What kind of coddling? When did this coddling take place? Just asking the usual 5-6 journalistic questions about it makes you realize how fucking tedious this particular bit of "news" is. It's actually not news, not a fact. It's a mean-spirited, trashy little aside. (Does this automatically mean I support "millionaires" exploiting and demeaning others? No, you idiot.)

Want a grim laugh? Picture Hitler ranting & raving at a podium, and that sentence appearing as the subtitle. "THEY HAVE BEEN CODDLED AND WILL BE CODDLED NO MORE!!!" crowd: "Heeeiiill!" Hitler was not a journalist.

All the little side commentary (I'm already too bored to cite other examples but it does get worse from there) sounds like something out of Idiocracy. Flagging this for being intellectually beneath us.

This aside from the author of the article made me laugh:

(In 2020, the idea that fishing for “clicks” to drive ad revenue is a successful or even common business model is a fallacy. Publications that rely exclusively on advertising are failing at an astonishing rate; financially, many journalistic outlets are increasingly moving away from an ad-based revenue model driven by traffic, and instead focus on live events, subscriptions, optioning their articles to movie studios, and other models that rely on having a dedicated readership that trusts the publication).

Yes, clickbait is a really uncommon business model, and loads of Vice articles are being made into movies. The lack of self-awareness is breathtaking.

Maybe they can use some of the excess power to secure the app

2020 in a headline

HN in a headline

too long to read ;

balaji has a beef with mainstream journalists since many months ago, and probably rightly so. I can't help but feel however that this whole outrage is covert advertising for Clubhouse which (even though i am not famous enough to use) seems basically a repackaging of the decades-old concept of phone hotlines.

That said, balaji is right, the media overplayed their role as arbiters of truth and are now losing. I d trust my twitter feed better than any paper.

Legal Analysis: "You really Shouldn't Record Clubhouse Calls"

https://prestonbyrne.com/2020/07/02/you-really-shouldnt-reco...

>The call shows how Silicon Valley millionaires, who have been coddled by the press and lauded as innovators and disruptors, fundamentally misunderstand the role of journalism the moment it turns a critical eye to their industry.

No, I would argue that journalists don't understand that their role requires objectivity, and that the whole industry is broken because it has been completely dominated by ideologues, top to bottom, who are blatantly pushing politics onto the masses.

Don't support BLM? Have legitimate criticism? Be prepared to be called out by "journalists" until you fall in line, if you don't get cancelled first. And let's be real, this has been the status quo regarding taboo topics for at least a decade.

Edit: would you all be downvoting if the same journalists were adding pro Trump spin to a sizable proportion (or majority, depending on the outlet) of non-editorial (but editorialized) media? I'm not going to support blatantly partisan writing by ostensibly neutral platforms simply because they represent my politics. We need objective news and the fact that it is impossible to be purely objective is not an excuse to deliberately pollute news articles and headlines with consistent agenda.

> No, I would argue that journalists don't understand that their role requires objectivity

Based on what? Objectivity hasn't been required since the printing press was invented

It's required because a democratic society relies on a healthy press. These are supposed to be scholars, with a code of ethics, dedicated to documentation. Journalists are not supposed to actually interfere in the system they are observing (e.g. by calling for de-platforming) because then they go from being journalists to being activists.

Edit: To be clear, I have no problem with newspapers including opinion articles about de-platforming, but there must be an acknowledgement that there's a difference between journalists and activists/thought leaders. We cannot go on mixing both.

Was Edward R. Murrow an activist?

Huh? Editorial boards express opinions all the time. The news has never been about documentation, there's always been too much to document.

Journalists are not mere observers, they are a part of the system itself and so cannot help but interfere with it.

You're asking for a state of affairs that had never existed.

De-platforming/cancelling is the hip word at the moment, and powerful people are getting nervous, because it is the rabble instead of the powerful doing the canceling.

I have two responses: (1) The amount of self-awareness demonstrated by the elites tends to be related to how they fair in peasant revolts. (2) People have short memories, the class-driven state of affairs you prefer will be back soon enough.

> People have short memories, the class-driven state of affairs you prefer will be back soon enough.

Are you sure? Can anyone be sure of this? The internet has fundamentally altered the dynamic with the new Gutenberg revolution. Now the angry mobs have louder voices than even the largest institutions. Worse, people at these institutions are encouraging the mob for clickbait driven profit.

The incentives are perverse and it's why a strong code of ethics is essential.

With unprecedented power comes unprecedented responsibility.

Based on what? Journalism has always been through the lens of the author and/or organization. Not every form of journalism is meant to be the AP news.

Ethics are rarely required but that does not lessen their importance. Are you argueing against having ethics in journalism simply because they were not required when the printing press was invented?

That's quite the leap you made there. Have you stopped beating your wife?

There are still journalists who do things like reporting, but I agree the growth in significance of opinion relative to reporting, including in some historically very respectable outlets, is a bit worrying.

Journalists have long been a self-aggrandizing bunch who think that the only people who'd ever dislike or distrust them are evildoers up to something dubious, though I agree the aggressive social justice activism is new.

This has been the status quo regarding taboo topics for as long as human language has existed, and I don't think it has much to do with the journalism industry.

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