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Comment by _zgx0 | Hacker News Reader

>Instead of covering the [tech] industry with a business press lens or a consumer lens they started covering it with a very tough investigative lens — highly oppositional at all times and occasionally unfair.

...

>Tech executives and investors mostly did not like this change, for understandable reasons. And I mostly agree with them on the merits.

The author agrees - that the tech industry should not be subject to investigative coverage?

That's nonsense. Tech now is the most wealthy and powerful industry in the US. Large tech companies have huge impacts on politics and news. Suggesting that tech should not be subject to investigative coverage is hard to understand. It seems like one of the most important subjects of that coverage today.

You can suggest that coverage is inaccurate or unfair, but suggesting that tech should not be covered with an investigative lens is hard to argue.

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> You can suggest that coverage is inaccurate or unfair, but suggesting that tech should not be covered with an investigative lens is hard to argue.

That's because he's being very charitable to what is happening. In fact, under the guise of aggressively investigative coverage, the media is constantly propagating false memes about the industry. Biggest example is the idea that it's dominated by a culture of white tech bros, when in fact it's dominated by highly educated and hard-working Indian and Chinese immigrants.

Too on the nose. When I worked at faang almost my entire org was Indians.

The generalisation of "Indians" in the tech sector is doing a lot more harm than one may think.

India is a massive country, with some of the most diverse range of cultures and people. The fact that most FAANG CEOs are Indians should speak volumes.

Negative stereotyping hurts everyone, only by acceptance and embrace our differences can we move forward.

Do you consider "Indians" to be pejorative?

He probably considers being lumped in with certain other Indians pejorative.

It's funny, on producing that interpretation my first thought was 'He must be high caste'. Now that's a negative stereotype!

Well it's less pejorative than "white tech bros" which encompasses an even broader range of cultural variations.

Do you mean Indian or Indian looking? Can you generally tell which of them were American citizens vs. immigrants? If not, can you see the pretentiousness in your statement?

People actually discriminate a lot more on accent than looks - which makes sense as an adaptive strategy, since accent is a much better signal of tribal association. And if one pays attention to accent it's pretty obvious who's an immigrant and who grew up locally.

Think about this the next time you read a New York Times article on some other bad industry: https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/

> Biggest example is the idea that it's dominated by a culture of white tech bros, when in fact it's dominated by highly educated and hard-working Indian and Chinese immigrants.

Those are two related but also completely different things. Just because immigrants work at these companies doesn't mean they have a large impact on the overall culture, especially not the outward facing culture, and they certainly aren't dominating it. If anything those groups are underrepresented in culturally influential positions.

How many white tech bros in india etc etc

I don't understand how you can say this when many of the largest tech companies have first immigrant CEOs. Of the top 10 tech companies globally, 4 (Meta, Apple, Tesla and Amazon) have CEOs of European descent.

Is the position of CEO not "culturally influential"?

We would need to look at the ethnicity statistics across C-level executives. Rishi Sunak is the British PM but I can say "UK politics and government is still dominated by Whites" and the British Parliament would agree with me [1]

https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn01...

That document says that Britain is 87% white I mean I don't know what you expect.

yes, that's exactly what I meant. I was demonstrating that just because the top guy is a member of the minority group does not mean that organization is "influenced" by minority group.

Edit: I finally read the context again. Yes the top guy is a member of a minority group, and of course he will have some cultural influence. But people will disagree whether the minority group is _at the right level of influence_.

Conversely, if you say that "UK politics and government is dominated by Whites" without mentioning that the Prime Minister is of Indian origin you are making an equally misleading omission.

That isn't something I said so there is no "equally misleading omission".

I didn't say it didn't exist. Considering how many Chinese and Chinese Americans work in the tech industry how many famous entrepreneurs, venture capitalist or programmers of such descent do you know of that the average hackers news reader or even the average person will know of? I bet that for most people it's few.

The argument was that investigating "tech bro" culture is frivolous because the tech industry is made up of immigrants and that is simply not true. It's still very much a prevailing culture. Heck, this entire discussions stems from "what is Elon Musk going to do (next)?" after replacing the CEO of Indian descent.

I wouldn't say the same thing about hardware. But that also isn't nearly as influential and also not a hot topic either.

He's not saying that they shouldn't be subject to coverage "with an investigative lens." He's talking about the adversarial, negative tone of the coverage, relating to the tech industry primarily as full of bad actors rather than a power center worthy of investigation that also does some good things, say. I don't think Yglesias would say we shouldn't investigate these companies, but rather that we should paint a more wholistic picture about both the good and bad contributions of these companies that better matches reality.

He correctly identifies a fundamental difference between business/consumer reporting, which is often fawning regurgitations of PR materials made with limited due diligence and investigative reporting. I stand by my comment, it seems to me that he is saying the change from business/consumer to investigative was unwelcome and he agrees with that reaction.

I think investigative journalism should be fair, but I don't think someone investigating Alphabet has to present the good that the company does - that's the job of Alphabet's PR department. Fair journalism does not leave out relevant context but doesn't speak to unrelated "good" contributions.

Should an investigation into political corruption talk about what good that politician did? Maybe if its directly related to the corruption, but otherwise no.

Personally when I look at the tech section I want to hear what's new in technology (I guess you'd call this marketing), not politics and gossip about what some rich meathead said. Put politics in the politics section, and the gossip in the tabloids.

That boat sailed a long time ago. And while yes, there is a lot of interesting tech news out there, we've had tech companies become the largest corporations on the planet gobbling up every bit of information on every person, well it gets political really quick.

Information technology companies have a lot of information you say? And I guess you mean a long time ago measured in months. These are soap operas to hook a million or so like-minded people, not real news. Certainly not going to change the minds they want to change.

Generally I think that's a problem with modern society, everyone thinks the biggest "problem" that needs fixing is each other and wastes their "civic improvement" energy on fighting to change rules back and forth. Step away from it all for 6 months and it will look small and childish.

Step away from it for 6 years and I think it will look incredibly unnerving to anyone concerned with healthy public discourse, or who values a shared sense of community.

Shouldn't good investigative journalism just tell you what's true regardless of whether it makes the subject look good or bad? I don't mean that every story must convey the totality of the subject, but the body of reporting should try to resemble the subject - some good, some bad.

> Shouldn't good investigative journalism just tell you what's true regardless of whether it makes the subject look good or bad?

GP already covered that:

> Should an investigation into political corruption talk about what good that politician did? Maybe if its directly related to the corruption, but otherwise no.

I don't think journalism is actually useful if the journalist is pure negative all the time; if you can't tell the difference between a journalist and a teenager with oppositional defiant disorder, why believe the story? And to investigate, they actually need good sources, but tech people who would be the sources aren't going to talk to an unfriendly uninformed reporter.

Although in this case, the NYT wasn't doing "investigative journalism", Matt is talking about a literal actual editorial mandate to write negative stories.

https://twitter.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1588231892792328192

I think the one I remember is when they wrote a story about LinkedIn doing unauthorized human experiments on the newsfeed, by which they meant A/B tests.

"XYZ corporation donated thousands of dollars to needy children this year as an example of an exemplary tech company.

In addition XYZ corp sold Iran social media tracking software allowing the government to ruthlessly execute the traitors that dare say negative things about the glorious leader

We offer XYZ the leaders in tech award" --NYT

Um, yea, have HR departments that tell everyone how damned good they are already. You could fill encyclopedias with the output every year. Meanwhile they aren't going to tell you how they do 50 bajillion means of tracking your wife to determine if she's pregnant in order to serve an ad to her first before their competitors (and offer the data to the state if requested).

It is OK to use adversarial tone. Journalists do not have to limit themselves to fawning admiration. And before there was criticism, there was surplus of fawning admiration.

Cool companies were praised to heaven and admired, Thermos, Tesla, Uber, Google, Facebook you name it. Correction was necessary.

You said

that the tech industry should not be subject to investigative coverage?!

Yglesias actually said:

And the press should try to normalize coverage of the tech industry as just another business sector.

Which would include investigative coverage when appropriate.

Fawning is typical of media coverage of most business sectors.

Don't think mining and oil and gas really get fawning reviews, or the local pizza place.

Or the most expensive restaurant in NYC: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/13/dining/pete-wells-per-se-...

The tech industry needs more investigative coverage, not less. The reason disasters like Theranos or Nikola were able to waste as much time and money as they did is because most of the tech press is focused on regurgitating press releases and hyping up the next big thing.

I don't see how investigative journalism would fix the situation though. Theranos scammed wealthy investors. Wealthy investors should be able to do at least a little bit of due diligence. If they had done that then they would've known their idea was not feasible.

It's the investors themselves that added to the hype regardless of the press releases.

Theranos scammed wealthy investors but also hurt a lot of other people in the process, namely patients who received bad tests and employees who have a black mark on their resume.

In an ideal world maybe investors would have done more DD, but there is a lot of money out there. Many investors likely did turn them down, since their funders didn’t include many traditional SV VCs, despite being next door to Sand Hill Road.

It was ultimately the WSJ that broke the story. Even if investors find something during DD, they have strong incentives (libel law) not to share it.

Remember Theranos wasn't even big tech, and only had one major Silicon Valley investor in it; they were a fake big tech company attracting people who wanted to be SV but weren't. The usual VCs didn't even trust them!

Add NRGV ("Energy Vault", once well over $2B, now $0.4B and still badly overvalued) to the Theranos pile. And all but one of the fusion startups. (Maybe them too.)

Kyoto Fusioneering has realized that there is lots of money to be made selling parts for phony demos to fusion startups.

BTW there will not be any Mars colony in this century. Or Tesla office-robot.

As noted in the quotes you yourself pulled, what OP "agree[s] with" "[t]ech executives and investors" about is tech coverage that is "highly oppositional at all times and occasionally unfair."

Nobody is "suggesting that tech should not be covered with an investigative lens."

> The author agrees - that the tech industry should not be subject to investigative coverage?

That this very basic failure of reading comprehension has been voted to the top is both sad and surprising.

That this very basic lack of clarity in writing was misunderstood is unsurprising.

Yglesias doesn't think that no investigation should be done or that tech is all good- he has a riff that "Facebook is bad, Facebook employees should feel bad about working there, and they should feel shame admitting where they work" that he goes on occasionally.

A major problem with the technology media is that they don’t investigate the companies, because they have to stay on their good side in order to be invited to the events, and to get the information. When they criticize the company the company freezes them out; i.e. Apple.

Tech now is the most wealthy and powerful industry in the US.

Nowhere near as powerful as media. Wealthy sure.

media == tech these days. twitter, Instagram, TikTok, FB, they are media, YouTube is media.

When it comes to the business of telling you what the nature of the world is and how to think, it's really impossible for me to conjure up something more authoritative than the New York times.

Sure there's people on social media saying things, but the stuff that's an echo of the NYT sounds right and true, the stuff that's against it sounds low-brow and coarse.

The New York Times (et al) set the official narratives. Faceboot and its ilk shape the many counter reactions to it. Despite being comprised of multiple journalists, everyone basically thinks of NYT as a singular entity with its own reputation. On Faceboot, memes carry the social proof of your own personal relationships. And the most worrisome is that people know NYT's narratives are not their own thoughts, whereas people think the narratives they got from Faceboot are.

That is your educated perspective. A larger share of Americans place greater trust in what they hear about public issues on social media from interesting personalities than in the NYT, sadly.

the NYTimes at this time has 4.sth Mio subscribers and 10k videos, indeed:

https://youtube.com/c/nytimes

Google is media.

The largest US companies by market cap considered “Information Technology” nowadays are Apple, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Visa and Mastercard.

>> highly oppositional at all times

> tech industry should not be subject to investigative coverage?

I don't see how you can read his quote and come up with yours. Absolute strawman

Not so sure about that, with a certain clickbait coverage of solarwinds story creating bad PR for Jetbrains, (perhaps among the least controversial tech companies).

That's what happens when liberal arts people think they're too delicate to understand anything more nuanced than US political thing of the day.

>Tech now is the most wealthy and powerful industry in the US.

I thought weapon and pharmaceutical industries beat the tech.

On power, probably (at least lobbying power - direct influence on us is the opposite); but on wealth, Apple + Microsoft is enough to make the tech sector the wealthiest.

“Tech now is the most wealthy and powerful industry in the US.”

Industries more powerful:

-Finance -Banking -Defense -Oil&Gas

I was going to post the same thing.

Dude's been going on a downward spiral for years. Nothing he says these days follows any kind of coherent framework, it's just something thrown on the wall to see what sticks.

He's really honestly describing himself with this take.

MattY is extremely consistent, but also can't help himself and constantly tweets in a layer of irony or two. This causes some people to get extraordinarily mad at him in the replies, at which point I like to play a game of figuring out how they misread the tweet, which they always seem to have done.

His actual articles are perfectly straightforward, sincere, and usually on some topic like "Boston subway stations should cost less to build".

He certainly USED to write articles like that!

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