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Comment by zcam | Hacker News Reader

> 1. TechCrunch is now 22 times more prolific than its founding year

> TechCrunch now covers 10 times more seed-stage startups

quantity != quality

It used to have a lot less noise/signal ratio on TC, it used to have decent quality posts (and editors), and a TCrunched effect that barely exists now since a post gets buried quite fast given the post rate.

These days getting mentioned on TC doesn't do/mean much, you end up between a new iphone speculation or some non-story about [insert web giant here].

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Those aren't even the important numbers. With 22x the number of articles and the ratio of small and mid stage startup to tech giant articles half of what it used to be, even finding the articles in the noise is a joke.

Then, once found, we have to deal with the quality problem you mention.

TechCrunch left my reading list almost a year ago for these reasons.

What do you use then to just keep yourself aware of new startups coming up? I am not looking for sites like BothSidesofTable and others from VCs or Cofounders. I am looking for a site that jusat tells me X is a cool service that does this and launched last week.

Sites like Startupli.st and betali.st have too many useless (sorry to those working hard at them) sites which makes it difficult to go and check each one of them.

So yes what other sources exist to get a superficial overlook of new startups.

I can't answer for SoftwareMaven but I use the same sources as where I get my news, such as HN. Any startup worth its salt is content marketing, blogging, podcasting, or whatever, and its stuff comes up on sites like HN.

That said, sites like ReadWriteWeb and Mashable also cover the beat well.

That's what I suggested with the quotes, at this rate startup news will drawn. But fortunately we have way more (quality) startup news sources these days.

Hi, I'm the article author. I agree getting in TechCrunch does not mean as much today as it used to. The SEO does help and if the article highlights strong growth, I've seen how it can attract investors/hires.

I do hope TC invests more in quality posts. Otherwise I think it risks being just a disseminator of news instead a creator of one.

Hi,

I am not sure about SEO exposure from TC, it certainly helps, but I would guess it is not as important as it used to be.

More quality posts wouldn't be enough imho, they should probably have/use more sub sites for what we consider noise and have the main site only talk about startups and related stories (maybe try to limit the number of stories per day, working a bit like a real newspaper in this respect). But it will probably never happen since it means less ad revenue.

Maybe it is too late anyway, I would guess the audience has changed a lot since it has broaden its topics selection, it wouldn't be considered a good judge of talent anymore, and I guess it isn't their primary goal anyway.

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