jkoebler

I wrote this article. The quote is in the headline because Instagram is calling it an error, I am not calling it an error. People have been wondering what happened and why, and have been posting on Reddit wondering why there’s no media attention. It’s a small signal, but I put the quote around “error” to indicate that I did some reporting and got official word from Meta about what happened, and was not just speculating.

Naming the site was a big struggle sesh. Lots of good names are taken, weren't the right vibe, etc. We sort of made the joke "404 Media Company Not Found" to ourselves but, I think to be honest we:

1) Like how it sounds

2) People get it right away, even folks I know who don't care a lot about tech journalism or aren't super internet savvy (maybe they are even more likely to find themselves on 404 pages!)

3) This is a little pretentious and not the actual reason we chose it (i.e. we realized it later), but we really do want to tell stories from "hidden" parts of the internet / tech and the undercovered parts of it. 404 pages are full of easter eggs, and maybe it's just something about accidentally stumbling onto a community or wold you didn't previously know existed.

AI will be one of our core coverage areas and I'm sure we will be doing pieces both short and in-depth on AI alignment, doomerism, optimism, etc.

This fully fully depends on the article. We want to respect our readers' time, so while we love doing big investigations, it's a lot to ask people to ONLY read 2,000-5,000-word articles about complicated topics. We want to have a lot of short posts that are insightful or about the news. So, for example, this was a breaking story I did yesterday:

https://www.404media.co/biden-administration-changes-mind-sa...

This article took me 20-30 minutes to write, edit, and publish. It's still news, but it's more of an update on something I've covered and written about literally hundreds of times before. So I am providing some of the context about the decision that I can recite from memory (I check the specifics, of course), telling people what's new, and providing them the document.

This article I published earlier today, meanwhile, is something I've been poking along on for weeks, talked to a lot of sources on, read a lot of academic papers on, etc.

https://www.404media.co/instagram-ads-illegal-content-drugs-...

At Motherboard our main way of operating was to always have a big investigation or narrative feature going on in the background, but to be on the lookout for news or timely things to do that align with our "beats" (the things we cover day-to-day, the topics we know inside and out). Usually features are something that you poke along on for weeks or months and go through a very rigorous back-and-forth editing process.

FOIA stuff can "take" months or years, but often very little of that is active work time. The way that works is you file a request, wait for the agency to respond, and bug them a bunch when they miss deadlines or don't respond. I've had FOIA requests returned the same day, and I've had others returned five years after I file them.

Good question!

We're going to join Mastodon I promise. Honestly the reason we haven't joined Mastodon yet is because there have been a million little things to adjust/fix in the days leading up to launch to make sure the site didn't break, to edit the stories, get art done, backend business stuff as well.

There are a lot of things we wanted to launch with that we haven't had time to do yet, which doesn't mean it's not a priority. As you can imagine we've had a few (very minor) urgent fires in the leadup to launch, so tbh our social media accounts across the board have taken a temporary backseat. Mastodon is high on our list and I'm sure we'll be there by the end of the week if not the end of the day.

Thank you for your support!

We actually saw that our name has confused this AI news site: https://twitter.com/ShortFormErnie/status/169403708675025348... So maybe the whole thing is a test for GAI and machine learning.

We know that it has an audience because millions of people read our journalism at Motherboard every month. We are making a bet that a small fraction of those people will be willing to pay for accountability journalism and offbeat stuff that people care about (porn, for one, but lots other things) but that might make advertisers nervous.

We are under no illusion that this will be easy but we are excited to give it a shot. The worst thing that can happen is that we tried our best on something we really believe in and enjoy doing, it doesn't work financially, and we ultimately have to go do something else. We are hopeful and optimistic that we CAN make it work, but already we are overwhelmed and thrilled with the response. It's only our second day but we're committed to becoming a vital publication for people who care about how tech impacts humans, and how humans impact tech. We understand we will need to prove this day in and day out for people to feel like they are getting their money's worth, or that their money is supporting a force for good in the world/the internet. But we really want to make that happen. Thanks for the kind words

Thanks for reading! Lots more to come :)

Hey there, Jason from 404 Media here. We're humbled that someone posted this and just wanted to say I'll stick around for an hour or so before I have a few interviews for articles scheduled, if anyone has any questions/thoughts/feedback. We're very grateful for the support and thrilled to be here

I'm the author of this article—both CTIA and CompTIA are lobbying against these bills, but CompTIA is the most actively outspoken.

If you are a member of CompTIA or certified by them or have any thoughts about them please reach out to me (my Twitter DMs are open: twitter.com/jason_koebler ... are Signal numbers allowed on here?), because I'm working on a deeper investigation about the group's shift from a certifications body to a lobbying arm of big tech.

From the article (which I wrote, happy to answer questions) ... this is quoted in the court decision i.e., was written by a judge not by the defendant:

"PCKompaniet does not pretend or market itself as Apple authorized and does not give any indication that the repair comes with an Apple warranty.”"

Hey—I wrote this article ... if anyone forks this and makes it real please let me know. @jason_koebler on twitter or jason.koebler@vice.com

Scalpers join fan clubs and have people on the inside who can do name changes for them

I was saying that artists and ticketmaster and politicians are happy to sell the narrative that "ticket bots and scalpers are the problem and we can't do anything about it" when that is very much not the case. Lots of fans buy this, because they don't know any better. As a journalist, the writing I've seen about the ticket industry the last year has been so, so bad and so simplistic and so infuriating, so I decided to do this piece to fight a lot of these misconceptions

I wrote this story and am happy to answer any questions you guys might have. Lots of information I ended up not using because the article was already incredibly long or I couldn't corroborate it (but believe it to be true from various interviews), etc.

Yep, I think this is the lesson we learned last week. The world doesn't end if any one of us drops.

Yeah, we have three people in the UK, two in Canada, and a handful of remote freelancers / contractors. Slack is definitely useful for keeping in touch with them. The question is, how much constant communication do we actually need to put out a day's worth of content? Most of us can work autonomously or with a little one-on-one chatting with our editors, but we were just on Slack because we were trying to create a virtual office that, while nice, probably isn't necessary to actually put out a product.

Yeah, I think this is right (I'm on the Motherboard team), I'm the one who made the "silo" comment. I think Derek's point in the article about Slack making it easy to disguise structural / workflow problems is very true. We don't hate slack and I'm sure we'll go back to using it, but by stripping down to nothing, it made the flaws in our workflow / approach more obvious. Now when we go back to it, hopefully we'll use it in a much different way. Frankly, I hope we don't ever go back or go back in a much scaled down way, but I'm not expecting that long term.

Hey, I'm the guy on the Motherboard team who said this. You make a fair point, but I think the main difference is that we're a team that publishes 20 or so stories every single day. That's 20 individual pieces of content that go from merely an idea to a finished, public product, usually in the course of a couple hours or so for each one. Each one doesn't require input but input is often useful for each of those. We have relatively few long-term projects (we do have them of course, but we don't use slack for those). That means dropping from slack means you completely lose track / have no input in perhaps many things that you could have helped out with. It's in theory not the end of the world, but we got used to providing input on basically every story, and so that's where I'm coming from on this.

I may be completely off base here, but I'm assuming that most Slack teams probably don't have products whose entire development cycle is only a few hours in many cases. Just my theory, maybe I'm a psycho with a short attention span, but I really don't think that's the case.

I see what you're saying—but companies regularly respond to things like this very quickly. At least to say "we're looking into it" or "can you give us some time to respond." Apple and every other major company has people on call for things like this 24 hours a day, they have email on their phone ... the company saw my questions and chose not to respond. They still haven't responded or acknowledged it.

I wrote this article, I gave Apple 18 hours to respond. The article has now been out for four hours or so, and it's been close to 24 hours since I originally asked them.

Apple RARELY responds to press inquiries and the only time it has reliably spoken to the press was during the recent encryption battle and that's because it desperately needed the public to understand its argument.

I understand what you're getting at, but Apple loses nothing by having the original story misreported—it ends up looking really good. Apple just straight up ignores reporters, all the time.

yes, thank you! Will look at this too

It does! Will look into this. Thank you

She's playing dumb, as are the FBI, the NSA, and everyone else. Clinton (and Obama) have many many advisers who DO know the issue and have explained it to them. She knows, in broad strokes, what's happening here, as does every major politician. This has now been an issue discussed before Congress many many times over the last two years, the FBI and NSA won't shut up about it. She knows.

I work at Motherboard, it's not advertising though reading it again it probably could have used a more skeptical tone at points. It's part of our Masters of Their Domain series, where we explore the history behind weird URLs. If you have any suggestions for domains, please let us know.

http://motherboard.vice.com/tag/masters+of+their+domain

oh there's all sorts of things you can call people

http://ieet.org/index.php/tpwiki/bioconservative

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Techno-progressivism

Apple is not required to keep society's interests in mind, that is true. But we are allowed to alert our fellow citizens about the fact that the company at best doesn't care and at worst is obstructing what may be in our best interests. I'm not suggesting in the piece that Apple is evil—I'm suggesting that the company is worth questioning on these arguably important issues it has either ignored or purposefully made worse.

Apple makes (or saves) at least $1 billion on repairing iPhones. They changed the interior design of the iPhone 6 vs the 5s to make it much more repairable. They are thinking about this

I didnt dwell on this point but I think it's important to point out to the reader who was there. Very few women, almost no people of color. This is a tech culture piece. It matters. As I said, didn't dwell on it but worth mentioning.

Hi, I wrote this article. If you have any questions feel free to ask.