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Comment by icey | Hacker News Reader

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icey

Did you read the article?

This sentence is in the first paragraph:

"... we’ve spent much of the last 36 hours talking directly to Twitter about the right way to go about doing that."

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For what it's worth:

ev: "@TechCrunch @arrington "we have been given the green light by Twitter to post this information" What?! By whom? That's not our understanding"

(http://twitter.com/ev/status/2676203744)

Well, I would say that does change things significantly. That's what I get for trusting what TC says in their articles.

Alright, that's pretty damning. As of now, I'm jumping on the "let's ban Techcrunch links from HN" bandwagon.

I think this is probably something that looks worse than it is. I can't see them flat out lying. I suspect they've been talking to marketing who said something like "we really wish you wouldn't publish this but if you're going to please..." followed by some requests as to how the information is presented. They then expressed that sentiment as "Twitter has given us the green light".

(Still a bit of misrepresentation but not the flat out lie it appears to be)

I could be wrong. But in a world where the CEO of Twitter can so quickly call B#S* I can't envision a scenario where TechCrunch doesn't have some explanation

I'm not sure how this could look a lot worse than it already is. If they asked really nicely and just annoyed Twitter into allowing this to be published, TechCrunch's actions are still appalling.

There's no way around it: what TechCrunch is doing is incentivizing the kinds of attacks Twitter is dealing with. Twitter will survive this, but a lot of the kinds of companies represented on Hacker News won't.

As much as I'd love to see this happen (more power to VentureBeat and ReadWriteWeb and, hell, even Mashable), Paul and Mike are friends so it's not happening. As much as I get my hopes up every month when this debate comes up, the guy who controls the bans has been pretty consistent on his position here.

Wow had no idea personal relationships were the factor overriding community pressure.

TechCrunch also gives YCombinator sites tons of write-ups. It's not anything underhanded, just a relationship that both sides benefit from - at the cost of the people who think Hacker News would be better without Arrington's peculiar brand of self-righteous yellow journalism.

If people stop voting them up, then there's no need to ban them.

Banning the domain smacks of censorship. If people at HN want to discuss a TC article, lets give them a place to do it. The answer to ugly speech is more speech, not censorship.

That's true in the public square. It's not true when you're trying to build and maintain a specialized community. The opposite of censorship is 4chan.

Hey, it's a democratic site. People vote up the articles.

If the problem is that not enough people know that TechCrunch stinks, then you should add a post about how they stink. I'd vote for that.

You basically have to trust that a majority (or at least plurality) of the people here are the sorts of hackers you want to hang out with. If that stops being the case, you've got bigger problems than TC stories.

Well, a democratic site doesn't imply that there's no censorship; a true democracy would permit the majority to censor the minority. But anyway, even without any editors stepping in to ban certain links, the site doesn't really function according to the wishes of the majority because there's no down arrow on stories. Getting to the top of the front page doesn't require majority support, but just enthusiastic minority support.

But still, it's like when I would steal your own belongings, then contact you and "talking to you directly" that I will return some of them back to you, and use others for my own benefit, even if it might do harm to you. We are still talking about publishing stolen documents, whether they contacted twitter or not.

That's a ridiculous strawman argument.

The information is out. It was sent to other people than TechCrunch, and those people will publish it. However, those people probably won't be as visible as TechCrunch. Thus, TechCrunch has decided to act as Twitter's PR department and publish, of the information they got, exactly the right subset of that information to make Twitter look good, hoping that once everyone hears the TechCrunch PR version, they won't be so interested in hearing the rest. If Twitter said "publish nothing", that's exactly what TechCrunch would do—but in this case that's not the best idea.

To claim that someone else would have done it anyway is not a very good defense. It also totally ignores the ethics of the situation.

Agreed - it's a crap and immoral defence (sic).

It's unfortunate bloggers don't have their own Geneva Convention (and no, that's not a tech conference in Europe)

Yes, it does ignore the ethics of the situation, because when information leaks to the public you no longer have an ethical decision to make, but a strategic decision of damage control. It becomes an exercise in pure game theory, as you can't assume that any given individual in the public will cooperate with you or be convinced by your arguments toward sympathy.

TechCrunch will only publish what Twitter lets them. In practice, in terms of who gets to make the decisions, this is the same situation as if Twitter found out they had been exploited and contacted TechCrunch to "leak" some PR for them. If Twitter wanted to do their damage control through some other outlet at this point, they could just tell TechCrunch to publish nothing, and then pick another news site and send the documents they choose to them. If Twitter wanted to do nothing, they could tell TechCrunch to do nothing, and then do nothing themselves. However, in both of these situations, once the information was published (and it would be—news is one of the most competitive businesses in the world, and one of the most cut-throat), TechCrunch would pick it up, because it would then be public and already available. The only difference, in this case, is that TechCrunch can publish the information "first." But that doesn't matter, really; as long as the information gets out, does it matter who did it first?

If Twitter said "publish nothing", that's exactly what TechCrunch would do

This claim is not supported by any statements from TechChrunch or Twitter, and contradicts Ev's claim, quoted above, that they haven't given TechChrunch a green light to publish anything.

I think you're just spreading misinformation to defend TechChrunch's quite indefensible actions. I call bullshit on your claim that TechChrunch would have published nothing if Twitter asked them that.

they haven't given TechChrunch a green light to publish anything

That's what they want the thief to believe. He needs to be satisfied that he's done the damage to Twitter that he set out to do.

Yeah, quick translation: "We know we're in the wrong, and we're going to blackmail Twitter into saying our release is OK."

One thing that wasn't clear to me until Arrington started talking about working with Twitter on this release, is that Twitter does have some non-legal leverage. I'm pretty sure they regularly give TechCrunch early or insider access to Twitter news. They could just as easily move that preferential treatment over to Mashable or GigaOm. At this point, the "news" organization that probably matters most to Twitter is CNN, not TC.

As other people have noted, the actual documents released haven't amounted to more than a gigantic press release for Twitter. Now we know that they dream big and care about their employees. I'm sure that's killing them.

The documents are not so positive.

They diss a large number of celebs, call GOOG and MSFT 'distractions' and really go to town on Marissa Mayer.

What's wrong with calling GOOG and MSFT distractions? I think almost every new company immediately gets hit by the biz dev people who want to start talking about deals. For the most part you just have to focus on yourself and your customers, so these advances can be really distracting. I guess the Kanye West stuff is a little harsh, I'll grant you that.

There is no right way to go about doing that.

The 'right' as in 'my right'? Where's Twitter on that?

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