Cancel culture, Twitter trendings and radical transparency

Most journalists are just not very good at their profession, they synthesize their content online through social media which has had disastrous downstream effects.

There are a few writers who do groundwork, travel and report from the field but sadly they’re becoming increasingly rare.

Not sure I see how Twitter is relevant - the author gets to the real answer by the end. DHH and Jason spent years crafting a narrative that they had figured out, quote, "the better way to work," and that they knew how to run a company in ways other people should emulate. They poured their effort into books and podcasts and blogs to create that impression. That's why a lot of people know about this ~50-person company and why a management blunder that causes a third of the company (so far) to leave is newsworthy.

Years ago I worked at a 50-person company that laid off almost all its employees. The only report was from one industry blog (from a blogger who really liked our product and was sad we never made it in the market), and no amount of clicking things on Twitter could have made more people notice. Social media and print media alike can amplify stories people are likely to care about, but there has to be an underlying story in the first place.

"Most of the content we read in a newspaper [sic] is false" is a very strong assertion to make, especially because in this case it is blatantly untrue. Basecamp's "radical transparency" was accompanied by a lot of explicit public messaging from the company's leadership, along with disclosure of internal discussions and the circumstances that led to the new policy. You can assert that there were falsehoods in particular articles about Basecamp, but everything I read tended to be fully supported by public disclosures from the company or disclosures from veteran employees (not a disgruntled junior employee that got laid off, someone with 5+ years at the company who decided to depart).

The author has points they intend to make and I won't claim that they are implicitly untrue (the argument that newspapers serve as unintentional propaganda has a lot of support behind it), but this situation does not support the points they are trying to make.

Slightly offtopic comment.

I have been on HN for over six months now and I admire how people here can go into deep discussions, unlike, let's say Reddit.

But it seems like there is a lot of noise on HN now, with poorly written articles like these, which I think makes HN less appealing.

I urge the people to not upvote these posts to the front page.

Many grammatical and spelling errors throughout, very distracting.

'culture'? That's not culture, that's just hate

The whole mess started because they kept (still keep?) an internal list where they made fun of their customers names for years. No company that is radically transparent can get away with that.