Leaving in a Huff | Hacker News Reader

Leaving in a Huff

ericdsnider.com

189 pointsquilby33 comments

Eric was actually talking about this the Rick Emerson Show (rickemerson.com) some time last week. I don't recall which day it was, but he shared the experience with the whole internet reaction to the email snip he posted that AOL subsequently responded to by claiming "oh no, we're not forcing anyone to work for free or be fired!" and then laid off the person who originally sent the email that was snipped from.

It was a sad and frustrating story to hear (though amusing and snarky as Eric tends to be, from my limited experience).

I'm a big proponent of doing what you love because you love it (like running a forum or BBS or online service or writing) rather than trying to suck every last penny out of something that you can. But when someone else is making every last dime on something while expecting your contribution to be entirely uncompensated, save for "but you'll see your name on a byline!", it is almost downright sickening.

Unfortunately, this is a trend on the internet. It seems that fewer places are willing to pay for writers or even photographers, anymore. You should be thankful that your work is going to be used at all and then you can use the fact that someone published your content as leverage to promote yourself into something that does pay, somewhere . . . unless those people want you to work for "ego", too.

It's very difficult to justify not paying content creators when you've just made a few hundred million dollars off of the "they should thank me for printing them!" model. Or . . . maybe that's exactly why it's so easy to justify. Why pay when they're giving it to you for free?

I'm grateful I never entered one of these industries. I grew up with dreams of being a writer. Then I had dreams of being a radio broadcaster. Then I had dreams of being a video game developer. I went into the world of enterprise software and unix and linux, instead. A world where there is competition, but people aren't practically throwing themselves at you to do the job for free, because it's "fun".

The issue behind the scene here is that AOL is creating significant financial liability under U.S. labor law when it tries to shift paid workers to "free" unpaid workers. I'm sure that's why AOL fired the editor, it had nothing to do with the internet blowback, rather legal had to circle the wagons to protect AOL corporate from future lawsuits for backpay.

This is classic price anchoring at work.

For years people would be very happy to produce work and get (somewhat) paid for it because it is about writing something they are passionate for. Then, this gets disrupted because the owner gets a big payout and doesn't share. Disgusted with how things have turned out, since they now perceive their work to be worth more, they leave. Suddenly the talent acquisition has turned into nothing.

(The case of HuffPost is somewhat different, presumably the traffic would stay around longer. )

But this business model is subject to disruption. I read that pirates operate on a fairness principle, because many of them suffered as sailors in government ships. May be someone here can start a HuffPost alternative that issues equity instead?

I didn't want to even read that, but it was so well written that I couldn't stop.

Ditto, pretty hilarious. "You've got fail."

yeah somebody should pay that guy to write stuff.

lol

Money quote is - AOL: you've got fail.

Just one of the many points where this guy made me chortle with schadenfreudige glee.

really? ... I thought it was

"Please. We may be whores, but we are not sluts."

OK, that's the other money quote. Actually, there was a lot of quotable material in there.

Indeed, at least one of the lines was lifted directly from a film. When I ran across that all-caps line at the end of the please-don't-reply-all section, I couldn't help hearing it in Gene Wilder's voice ala Willy Wonka.

"suspicious foreign person Arianna Huffington" made me snort my coffee...

Holy crap, Eric Snider used to write for the BYU student newspaper and I loved reading his column! I even bought his compilation books: http://www.amazon.com/Snide-Remarks-Eric-D-Snider/dp/B000REH... and http://www.amazon.com/Snide-REmarks-II-Electric-Boogaloo/dp/...

You won't be disappointed to read him.

Anyone else ever feel that watching AOL do anything is like watching your child make a bad choice, and knowing that you can't stop them?

I'm getting to the point of just feeling sorry for them nowadays.

I was thinking when they bought Techcrunch things might be on the up for them.

Clear miscalculation on my part as AOL are still fail.

The face palms started with the AOL/Time Warner fiasco in 2000.

I still remember sitting in my basement watching the NASDAQ hit 5000 and thinking this wasn't going to end well. The AOL/Time Warner merger a month later didn't help that feeling. Too bad I was a poor 19 year old college student who didn't understand how the financial world works at the time.

The merger was sheer brialliance on the part of AOL. Aware of how completely overvalued they were, they "merged" (aka bought) Time Warner for pennies on the dollar of real value. Then when the dot-com bubble burst, they didn't get completely hosed as their share price dropped to nothing, which is what happened to everyone else.

(note: I'm not sure of my history here, so please feel free to correct me if you know better)

At the time AOL really thought they were going to be the savior of traditional media. The sky was the limit and they were no where near the top. The next place everyone would go to get their news, entertainment, and world information would be "web portals." The idea was to cram as much stuff as possible on your homepage were people could see everything and amazed at the sheer amount of information. AOL did it, Netscape did it, Yahoo did it , etc.

TL;DR: It's a well written chronicle of the corporate communication that occurred during the restructuring of cinematical.com/moviefone.com under AOL after they were bought from Huffington. The author wrote freelance for cinematical. After the editor-in-chief at cinematical resigned (and two other editors there had resigned), the editor-in-chief of moviefone was apparently put in charge of corralling the freelancers. The author is responsible for starting the internet backlash which led to the firing of the editor-in-chief at moviefone. He respects her a lot and regrets his involvement in bringing about her termination.

I would add that AOL let go most of the freelancers, retaining only a select few to fill the gap while they got their 'unpaid bloggers' lined up to fill the content void. And that the freelancers who had been let go were offered the 'opportunity' to continue writing, without pay, as unpaid bloggers.

This is the kind of post that really should not be TL;DRed, because it's so much fun to read. The story is sad and even infuriating, and not very original either (since all corporate takeovers are done in the same cowardly manner by weasels); but the writing is wonderful.

> The transition was going to be arduous and complicated. This was particularly true for the people who write AOL's press releases, who had to work overtime issuing statements with business terms like "restructuring" (which means firing people), "streamlining" (which also means firing people), "re-branding" (which means making people forget all the negative associations they have with AOL and Arianna Huffington), and "synergy" (which doesn't mean anything).

I think that AOL/Huff has actually been fairly distinct in how badly they have handled these layoffs. It seems like "Transition 101" to share the fired/staying personell information all at once. To drag it out over any period of time just seems extremely odd.

It was handled in a Monthy Python's way, as per the opening credits of The Holy Grail:

> A Møøse once bit my sister ...

We apologise for the fault in the subtitles. Those responsible have been sacked.

Mynd you, møøse bites Kan be pretty nasti...

We apologise again for the fault in the subtitles. Those responsible for sacking the people who have just been sacked have been sacked.

Møøse trained by TUTTE HERMSGERVORDENBROTBORDA

(...)

The directors of the firm hired to continue the credits after the other people had been sacked, wish it to be known that they have just been sacked.

The credits have been completed in an entirely different style at great expense and at the last minute.

(etc.)

- - -

It's unwise to fire the firers at the same time as the firees.

AOL has long tradition of laying people off sporadically: http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-aol-layoffs-....

Don't assume this a new thing.

It was actually quite lengthy- I for one appreciate a TLDR on even the good reads to let me decide if I should spend the time on it right then.

> TL;DR

But then you'd miss this:

"Non-paid blogger system"? Please. We may be whores, but we are not sluts.

Genius.

Jason Calacanis should negotiate to get cinematical back from aol. They clearly have no idea what to do with it and I'm sure he'd have no problem with the whole "pay people who create content" model.

He'd probably continue the confusion he's caused with the existing TWiT network by rebranding it "This Week In . . . Cinema". Unless he could find a way to do some namedropping in the rebranding, too.

"... suspicious foreign person Arianna Huffington". I know that he's not a big fan of Arianna's but that statement makes him sound like a Xenophobe.

Not at all, or he wouldn't have used that intentionally awkward-sounding construction. Xenophobes don't talk like that; humorists do.

I read the first few paragraphs and couldn't tell where this was going. Is there a tl;dr version?

Sure there is, but quite honestly this isn't something most people would value for the plotline. It's something you will enjoy reading because the story's prose alternately moves and amuses, portraying the situation as a tragi-comedy. I can tell you that BigCo buys LittleCo, merges LittleCo with MiddleCo, brings in Chainsaw Huffington to fire hundreds of people, and along the way there are SNAFUs as the company tries to restructure things. Those are the ostensible facts.

But that plot is played out somewhere every week, it's not worth reading unless you have a personal interest in the people or the companies, or unless the story is told in a way that moves you. Thus, I suggest you stick with it and read the entire thing. Or if you're too busy to read the entire thing, skip it: There'll probably be a story just like this about Yahoo! shuttering one of its acquisitions in a week or so.

It is hilarious, read the whole piece.

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