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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

No, reporters didn't "scam" readers.

I'm sick of people trying to twist words to mean things they don't.

Scamming someone requires obtaining something like money in the process (fraudulently). SBF ran a scam because he took people's money and used it fraudulently.

Reporters just ran puff pieces. But they didn't defraud anybody. The reporters weren't investors in Alameda. They didn't obtain anything except the normal salary they get for any story.

So no, reporters did NOT "scam" readers. They just engaged in run-of-the-mill journalism. You can critique that all you want, but it still falls under the category of "journalism", NOT the category of "scam".

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> scamming someone requires obtaining something like money

I would say "something of value". It doesn't have to be money. Attention is valuable - personally I consider it my most scarce and valuable resource.

I don't think it's unreasonable to create a comparison between stealing people's attention and stealing people's money. We focus a lot on the latter, but we are starting to focus on the former too, usually in the form of criticizing social media.

Take Facebook. They grabbed people by creating a system to connect with friends, family etc. and created an inescapable network effect for an entire generation. Then they morphed slowly into an outrage generation private data stealing machine to the huge detriment of millions of people - entire countries in fact, like Myanmar. The money they make is one step removed from the people being scammed, which makes it a little harder to directly characterize this as a scam. But it is a scam, just as much as this crypto stuff is, only far worse.

Reporters running puff pieces to generate outrage - or rather, their publications - are doing the same. Stealing your attention to get money from advertisers. They are just less successful. Same sea, tiny biting fish where Facebook is a shark.

> Reporters just ran puff pieces. But they didn't defraud anybody.

And they running puff pieces after the scam was uncovered. And they're trying, after having presented SBF as a genius, to now make believe people that it's only leveraged trades (to the tune of tens of billions of dollars) with customers fraud gone wrong.

Why is anyone still reading the garbage coming out of these papers that aren't even suitable as toilet paper is beyond me.

Meanwhile there are people out there who exposed the Alameda Research ponzi before FTX was even created. It was the same ponzi as the Bitconnect ponzi: say you notice crazy arbitrage [1] and promise insane returns "guaranteed zero risks".

Insane returns promises have a name: scam. Giving the insane returns to the early investors while keeping the scam going as another name: ponzi.

And this was all explained years before the ponzi was exposed.

And in addition to that US congressmen and senators are accusing SBF and ex-officials and officials to be working hand in hand to allow FTX regulatory capture of the crypto exchange market...

And you dare tell us that the journalists trying to sell the "leverage trades with customers money gone wrong" are still... Journalists engaged in run-of-the-mil journalism?

Despite all the donation SBF made to these publication?

Please.

I mean: the only other explanation is that these journalists are so incompetent they shouldn't be allowed anywhere near a keyboard. They should be flipping burgers and even then I wouldn't want to eat the poison they'd be serving.

The thing to remember about journalists is that they have a degree in journalism. Not math. Not science. Not engineering. Not politics. Not economics. Not medicine. Not agriculture. Not history. And certainly not statistics.

But they pontificate as if they are in possession of revealed truth.

What they wrote about the 737MAX is a stellar example of such ignorance. The only correct sources of information about it came from Aviation Week or official NTSB reports. The rest was all garbage.

Everything you said about journalists, you can say about product designers or software developers. Yet products continue to be designed and software continues to be written. It's almost as if learning doesn't end at the terminal endpoint of a college education.

> Everything you said about journalists, you can say about product designers or software developers.

True enough when they pontificate about other fields, but I expect product designers to develop good products, and software developers to develop good software.

Virtually nobody with a career in product design goes to school for a degree in it, and most software developers are computer science grads, which has almost nothing to do with actual software development.

I don't know about the outlets mentioned in this article, but there are a few different ways that PR firms can grease the media gears in order to get you good PR coverage. Ranging from, literally paying for a piece to be run, to more subtle things like handing them timely content on a silver platter. Maybe no money is exchanged hands, but they get some of their work done for them instead. It is still value exchanged without money being exchanged.

Newspapers sell legitimacy and scammers can buy it. SBX is a pretty significant example of the eroding value and public perception of media

Except we don't know how many of them got any kickbacks, and we probably never will. We don't live in moral utopia.

What’s your evidence that any of them received kickbacks? Why’s your default assumption guilty until proven innocent?

This is not a default assumption. He made significant grants to Vox [0], Intercept [1], ProPublica [2], and others.

[0] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/11/how-sbf-sweet-talked...

[1] https://mobile.twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/159438695831434...

[2] https://www.propublica.org/atpropublica/bankman-fried-family...

> announced a $5 million grant to ProPublica on Feb. 28, 2022. Over three years, the donation will support investigations…

Curious does the full $5M still stand or does the remaining $3.75M disappear or go back to creditors?

We know for a fact that SBF gave donations to ProPublica, the intercept, vox, and others. What we don't know and is probably unknowable is to what degree those payments influenced the reporting.

Reporters report, don't comment, so the correct word to use here is always journalists.

It's true that it's not an actual scam, but I do agree with the use of the strong language in calling it a "scam". Journalists are supposed to report things objectively.

Instead of giving a balanced perspective, the fall into the trap of portraying individuals as heroic geniuses or villainous morons (presumably because it sells better). If they're not going to be objective then they kinda deserve to be called out.

> They just engaged in run-of-the-mill journalism.

Click bait puff pieces/native ads intended to drive money into FTX. They're an accomplice.

Is everyone who tweeted nice things about SBF also an accomplice?

If they stood to make money, yes.

So the entire cryptop industry scammed the entire crypto industry then

Sounds about right, sunshine must be bright if you're just now coming out from under that rock. The Crypto Industry is nothing but scams on top of scam on top of scams in order to show legitimacy. Hell try to get an _actual_ trusted audit. I'll hold my breath.

Personally I agree with you on that. I just don’t think it’s reasonable to say that fluff pieces in the media makes the “reporters” accomplices to the scam.

I put reporters in quotes because any halfway decent reporter would have known to dig around a bit but that’s just unfortunately not how the largest newspapers operate, with a few exceptions.

Correct. Those of us that actually remember this 'technology' remember that it existed back in the late 1970s as a permissionless distributed database. It was an unworkable mess then, and look at what we currently have right now.

https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com

Remember the Fyre festival scam? The PR agencies knew it was a scam and went along with pushing and then said something philosophical about whether they should be responsible or not for "just doing their job". Their entire job is to make gold out of dog poop, so yes, they share some responsibility.

The definition of the word journalism is as follows:

"journalism, the collection, preparation, and distribution of news and related commentary and feature materials"

These people do not actually do journalism. They are in effect PR shills. The very first part of the definition is not done. They don't actually collect information, they just publish what they're handed in the most enthusiastic manner.

Professionals like marketing firms and lawyers are virtually never held to account when their clients are eventually caught. So they're just responding to the incentives we've set up for them.

Journalists will sometimes at least suffer a bit of a reputational blow.

Yep, Wirecard is another such example where a huge accounting firm E&Y didn't even have any reputation damage worth mentioning. As you say it's a failure in our incentives.

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