The Moral Of The Story Is Never Sell Half Your Company For $1,000

"One of the reasons I don't read tech blogs is because very often they're just recycled HN comments."

Since there is an ongoing discussion of the quality of HN comments and whether or not they are improving or declining in quality, I'd like to dive into this bit more.

Given the kicker 'Nice one Erick' I'm wondering if this is a complaint that pathik (the author of the referenced comment) is in 'real life' Erick Schonfeld or if its a complaint that Erick plagiarized the comment and turned it into a throw away opinion piece on TechCrunch?

One might argue that mining HN comments for OpEd blog pieces would be one way of producing content likely to appeal to the HN readership. In this particular case a one-liner comment by pathik was fleshed out (slightly) into a comparison of investors using a quality metric of their startup ROI. Without taking into account their negative ROI on things that went south. In my opinion the lack of depth or extended insight in the TechCrunch piece was what made it 'throw away.'

And one of the things about 'dynamic' journalism is the whole echo chamber effect. Perhaps most interestingly demonstrated when the 'primary source' for Wikipedia articles are articles that are published outside of Wikipedia but point back to Wikipedia as either one of, or their only source [1].

So if we are successful at creating really high quality comments on HN, and people take those insights and turn them into traffic generating blog entries (taking on some of the mantle of insightfulness) do we care?

Personally I don't particularly care if someone takes something I've said and writes it up and gets credit for it. But its definitely a weird part of this interconnected social opinion graph that is created by the web.

[1] http://techdebug.com/blog/2008/04/19/wikipedia-article-creat...

He may very well turn out to be a rich felon. What I hate about felony convictions is that they get you lumped into the "felon" category with people who have committed much worse crimes. In this case it seems the dude was busted for possession of shrooms. Why categorize him the same way as we would with other felons such as murderers or rapists. On the other hand, it's everyone who has an interest in tearing him down who are calling him a felon (media and Facebook.) Let's see if people will be calling him a felon when he's 100+ million richer. He's a great investor! Maybe he can invest in my startup.