Comment by gonehome | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gonehome | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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