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Comment by staunch | Hacker News Reader

TechCrunch's days were numbered the day Arrington sold it to AOL. The honeymoon rarely lasts more than a year, so this is right on time.

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I'm personally of the opinion that there's a finite number of times that I'm willing to tolerate "histrionic linkbait" headlines.

From tech crunch and a number of other providers that find themselves in the top spot on HN I've personally stopped logging through to the actual article until I've at least read a few comments.

Does the discussion warrant my heading through to the full source? Usually, no.

I know that from the general success of these pages and places like Fox News, there seems to be a near-enough-bottomless appetite for histrionic linkbait in the news, so I'm pretty sure it's never going to go away.

Part of me however wonders if there is any correlation between those posts we see from time to time entitled "I'm leaving Hackernews forever" or "Hacker News has gone downhill" and the number of high-drama BS posts that make it onto the front page over a particular timespan. Maybe it's just cumulative over time, you eventually have your "fill" and leave.

I guess I'm kinda just rambling a bit... but it seems to me that TC puts out a lot of noise. Was "angelgate" pre-AOL ? Maybe it's always been that way.

You're not being entirely fair to AOL here: Arrington could have just said "no way" to the whole CrunchFund thing and posted a TechCrunch rant if it did go through. That would have made it much harder to sustain accusations of a conflict of interest (the critics are certainly less noisy about TechCrunch's coverage of AOL these days, although that's obviously a no-no according to classical journalist ethics.)

AOL is in no way perfect, but let's not place all the blame on them.

I think the fundamental issue is that the powers-that-be at AOL that helped bring the fund into existence wanted to do it IN ORDER TO leverage the TechCrunch name.

AOL didn't know that, and apparently either didn't care or wished for a conflict of interest.

Arrington knew there would be no conflict of interest from his own actions, but has stayed 'blind' to this conflict in approach from his major LP. For whatever reason, he went ahead with this plan, causing significant agitation at TC, and also indicating to the TC staff how much influence AOL has right now; on paper maybe not so much; with only a few 10s of millions of dollars, though, they can rule Michael's roost.

This isn't going to finish well, but I think we all knew that.

There's no need to be fair to AoL. Its record speaks for itself.

100%. So how long for arrianna then?

Don't make the mistake of confusing the word most with the word all when considering what happens in mergers and acquisitions. The application of natural selection to these situations is apt.

Consider both TechCrunch and The Huffington Post pre-sale to AOL. Which one would you have said made sense and which would you have said not-in-a-million-years? The TechCrunch acquisition was to literally buy credibility, whereas the Huffington Post purchase was to resource a strategy. Arianna Huffington makes AOL stronger in the traits that it has self-selected for. She's going to be just fine.

Arianna was the one who announced that Arrington would no longer be doing TechCrunch now that he was doing CrunchFund. The higher-ups at AOL were apparently on board with the plan for him to do both up until then.

I don't have any inside information, but one possible interpretation is that Arianna made this announcement to effectively force AOL to choose to either back her or back Arrington. They seem to have backed her, which has strengthened her control over the content engine that more or less drives the current AOL. With both Arrington and Topolsky gone (along with much of Topolsky's team), there's really not anyone there with the stature to challenge her in this area.

Honestly, it looks like she could be positioning herself to be the successor when Armstrong gets the boot for the current straits AOL finds itself in. Why leave the company when you can just run it?

Edit: Huffington clarifying Arrington's (non-)role: http://www.businessinsider.com/mike-arrington-no-longer-work...

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