Arrington : "You’re Welcome, You Bastards" • Hacker News Board

Re: Arrington : "You’re Welcome, You Bastards"

#71

Post by megablast » Thu, May 13, 2010, 10:28 PM UTC

billclerico wrote: post #30

nopal wrote: post #9

This sounds like someone at Fortune trying to do something industrious and then getting smacked by the higher-ups. I wonder how many good ideas are quashed simply because of policy.

a better technique would probably have been to apologize to techcrunch for telling them the wrong thing, and then asking to take it down. as opposed to telling arrington that he misunderstood.

That would be admitting you are wrong. You can never admit you are wrong, it makes you look weak. If you look weak, you will not get anywhere.

This is really how some people think.

Re: Arrington : "You’re Welcome, You Bastards"

#72

Post by mst » Thu, May 13, 2010, 10:28 PM UTC

danh wrote: post #53

edw519 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

slanted attack on Michael Arrington cute character attack Not an attack, just an observation. And not of his character (which I am hardly qualified to judge), just of his behavior in this particular post. I dunno, posting word for word emails from someone else in a blog just seems a little over the top to me, regardless of the reason. I don't know the merits of this case, nor do I care. The antecdote was to make a po…

Thank you for introducing me to "antecdote". Brilliant word! I suppose it is half anecdote, half antidote, which must be highly useful. Or is it maybe an ante-anecdote, an amusing story in advance (a.k.a. prophecy)? Not surprisingly, such a useful word is in widespread use, apparently. 33,200 uses to be exact, according to Google. But no clear definition, according to antecdotal evidence.

ITYM "the available antecdata" (the plural of anecdote is anecdata, doncha know ...)

Re: Arrington : "You’re Welcome, You Bastards"

#73

Post by megablast » Thu, May 13, 2010, 10:29 PM UTC

edw519 wrote: post #18

I once had a friend who never forgot a birthday or holiday. I always got a card from him. The problem was that it was always a card that someone else had sent him . He scribbled over their message and wrote his own, then added a lame message, "I'm doing my part by recycling." This went on for years and I hated it. It wasn't funny anymore and I didn't want to read what others had written to him. Then it hit me... Who…

Perhaps the better option is to only send emails you don't mind anyone else reading. And I would even suggest that you extend this to everybody you email.

Re: Arrington : "You’re Welcome, You Bastards"

#74

Post by [deleted] » Thu, May 13, 2010, 10:31 PM UTC

gluejar wrote: post #26

Arrington's post with excerpts is exploitative of Fortune. Once you've read the TechCrunch post, there's no value left in reading the Fortune articles. Sure, it great for selling the book, but the magazine is screwed. On the fortune side, they were not clear about whether they're promoting the book or the magazine, since their editor is the author, so Arrington has a legitimate excuse by arguing that he's just not ve…

[deleted]

Re: Arrington : "You’re Welcome, You Bastards"

#75

Post by megablast » Thu, May 13, 2010, 10:33 PM UTC

huntero wrote: post #50

"I’d love to chat with you about FORTUNE’s exclusive excerpt of David Kirkpatrick’s book on Facebook" "note that the story stems from an exclusive excerpt in FORTUNE of David Kirkpatrick’s new book The Facebook Effect." "once you’ve read the excerpts, please let me know if you choose not to post on one and not the other or both" The use of the words "exclusive" and "on" seem to make it pretty clear that he was suppos…

Ask yourself, could they have been clearer? I mean, the fact that you are looking for clues like certain words suggests that they certainly could have written those emails better.

I don't enjoy trying to ascertain what someone is trying to say, I guess I am not a fan of mysteries. Say it plainly and clearly, and these sort of mistakes do not go on.

Re: Arrington : "You’re Welcome, You Bastards"

#76

Post by cherif » Thu, May 13, 2010, 11:01 PM UTC

nopal wrote: post #9

This sounds like someone at Fortune trying to do something industrious and then getting smacked by the higher-ups. I wonder how many good ideas are quashed simply because of policy.

That's the first thing I thought. An intern or junior PR person taking initiative and then getting slammed by their boss. Now they (junior PR) have to backpedal to avoid getting shit from their old-school boss and, as a result, all of Fortune look like idiots.

Re: Arrington : "You’re Welcome, You Bastards"

#77

Post by ismarc » Thu, May 13, 2010, 11:07 PM UTC

danudey wrote: post #62

ig1 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is neilc's post getting downvoted ? - it seems a perfectly valid contribution to the discussion.

On the one hand, yes, he has a valid point, but I'd guess the downvotes are from people who feel that being unclear in your communication, then calling repeatedly over and over to have you take down a post full of glowing praise and preorder links on a hugely popular blog, then, when you refuse to edit what is probably the best PR the book's had so far, threatening to sue you to have you take it down. Fortune could h…

Except for the fact that the entire blog post with the excerpts has no content except the excerpts. There's no value to be derived from it except reading the excerpts. There's no trimming them down, they are the only content.

Re: Arrington : "You’re Welcome, You Bastards"

#78

Post by jrockway » Fri, May 14, 2010, 12:03 AM UTC

fleitz wrote: post #19

nopal wrote: post #9

This sounds like someone at Fortune trying to do something industrious and then getting smacked by the higher-ups. I wonder how many good ideas are quashed simply because of policy.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world, the unreasonable man expects the world to adapt to him, therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

All regression also depends on the unreasonable man.

Re: Arrington : "You’re Welcome, You Bastards"

#79

Post by nostromo » Fri, May 14, 2010, 12:09 AM UTC

dkarl wrote: post #64

greyman wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard to say...they wrote to "post on excerpts", but not "post excerpts". But obviously, what would Mike gain by only posting excerpt of the excerpt? Anyone can do that without asking permission from Fortune, it's just normal blogging practice. Now when I think about it, Fortune looks even more ridiculous in my eyes. They basically asked TC to blog about their promotional article for free. ;-)

I agree; to me, the email says that the post would be about the excerpts, and the excerpts themselves were provided simply because they weren't live on the Fortune site yet. The email quotes in the post do NOT say he is going to post the excerpts. In fact, referring to Fortune's "exclusive excerpts" clearly implies that they'll only be available on Fortune's site, i.e., not on Techcrunch. He simply misread the emails…

Well, except the part where they email him saying, thank you great post.

Re: Arrington : "You’re Welcome, You Bastards"

#80

Post by invisible » Fri, May 14, 2010, 12:18 AM UTC

The huge problem here is that they provided him all of this content and neglected to say, "Slim this down and use no more than 115 words." They neglected to give him a guideline to follow - and better yet, they should have just given him what he needed to create the post and nothing more.

If someone comes to me and says, "Create a post based on all of this content," I am not going to take the time to pick and choose selectively what the reader sees. Why should he take the time to inconvenience his readers?