The reality is that TC posts 30+ articles per day. Articles from may 6 are now part of a very, very long tail of TC articles that will barely dribble in pageviews.
Arrington : "You’re Welcome, You Bastards"
101–110 of 122 posts
Re: Arrington : "You’re Welcome, You Bastards"
#102Er, that's not an excerpt, that's like 4 (book) pages of text there.
Someone screwed up at Fortune and tried to backpedal.
Re: Arrington : "You’re Welcome, You Bastards"
#103This has such a linkbait headline. This is some completely uninteresting drama about, at least to me. But the headline is such that my impulse is to click on it. I guess that makes me weak. But why do people upvote shit like this in the first place? Do people really care about some squabble TechCrunch are having with some other crowd? Is this really actually interesting to hackers? I really hate when I come here and…
Although you are at -2, I'll answer you anyway. It's interesting to me because it shows me how things really work inside. Deconstructing stuff to find out how it works is part of hacking. Now I understand better how Forture gets an exclusive and how they go around and ask blogs to cover and promote it, and how bloggers think when they receive such offers.
Well, thank you for responding anyway. I knew I was going to get downvoted for that comment, I just felt I needed to say it. To be honest I have no idea who Fortune are or what any of this is about really, so I was never in a position to comment on whether or not this is interesting. Fair enough if it is actually something interesting.
I just find linkbait headlines like that in really bad taste and it disappoints me when I see a lot of them on the frontpage.
Re: Arrington : "You’re Welcome, You Bastards"
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
In the testosterone-crazed and liability-ridden culture of corporate America, this viewpoint is consistent with the rest of the universe.
Re: Arrington : "You’re Welcome, You Bastards"
#105Sometimes shit just happens. Let it go, move on. The mistake here wasn't a miscommunication, it was in not realizing the cat was out of the bag and just cutting your losses. Just like you can't get unpregnant, you can't retract stuff once it's posted on one of the web's top blogs. Fortune's type A control freak lawyers still need to learn that it seems. The correct response from Fortune: "Oops, that's not what we int…
Except that screw up may wind up costing Fortune a good chunk of change, in either lost advertising revenue from the "exclusive" or from Simon and Schuster seeking damages for some contract violation.
Given the size of Fortune's response and S&S getting involved, my gut tells me it's the latter.
Re: Arrington : "You’re Welcome, You Bastards"
#106Arrington's just being Arrington. Nothing to be done about that.
Characteristically, he is ebulliently and abrasively assertive--indeed, at times belligerent--of his right to publish whatever he feels like publishing that day, and often frames it as a freedom of speech issue in a commercial context.
This is a trait of, on the one hand, some of the world's most venerable investigative journalists and insightful commentators, but, on the other hand, also of the sleazy yellow press and fraternal unprincipled viewership/readership/ratings whores with more ignoble motives.
As far as I can tell, TechCrunch is a slightly less toxic kind of Daily Mail. It should not be controversial to any reasonable person that there is merit to both sides of the issue insofar as lack of initial explicit prohibition on publication of whole excerpts does not necessarily mean it was categorically acceptable, nor does it mean that any demands for retroactive remedies from Fortune are irrelevant. On the other hand, they are obviously both trying to bully him and do something quite stupid.
Re: Arrington : "You’re Welcome, You Bastards"
#107Personally, I like that he is standing up for himself. Playing chicken with Arrington might not be the best idea. From what I've seen in the past (posts like this) he is more than open about what people say in (assumed) private e-mails/phone calls. My guess is they back off shortly. No one likes having their dirty laundry airing to the public. Thought they could push him around behind closed doors.
He's rather open with things that are assumed public but also assumed to likely stay within the relatively small communities whence they germinated. Not technically a violation of anything, but morally inconsiderate without asking first.
I'll make no secret of my own grudge with Arrington. Back in December, I wrote this comment - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=998318 - on Hacker News, rather critical of loud web acquisitions by Russian investors. Without so much as a heads up, to say nothing of a polite request for permission, this earned me a TechCrunch post: http://techcrunch.com/2009/12/20/are-hot-u-s-startups-the-ne... ...
Perhaps obviously but perhaps not, as a native Russian, and given what I had to say in that comment, I am not particularly interested in the kind of magnified exposure or attention that being linked on TechCrunch provides. It was a genuine statement of opinion that I more or less intended for the general HN audience. I don't really need it rubbed in the faces of these barons' hit-men that I, uh, slandered them. Sure, it's part and parcel of posting something to the public Internet, and, certainly, anyone searching Google can find my comment easily -- fine. But a little bit of consideration from Arrington's yellow journalism machine might have been helpful.
Re: Arrington : "You’re Welcome, You Bastards"
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
The excerpts were Fortune's exclusive because they got to print them first and TechCrunch to post later, marking Fortune as the originators of the scoop.
The Fortune PR person explicitly asked him to have his posts about the excepts put up at the same time as the actual excerpts on the Fortune site.
>"There were rules, said Fortune. We had to prominently link to their articles printing the excerpts. And agree not to post _until_ they had posted their stuff."
Until (my emphasis), means that they couldn't post simultaneously, nor before. I deduced then they were required to post after.
There most have been a counter statement elsewhere given your upvotes, sorry I missed it, what was it?
Re: Arrington : "You’re Welcome, You Bastards"
#109I 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…
Arrington is a journalist. Fortune sent him stuff and said 'publish this'. No suprise that he published it. If you sent him something 'off the record', I have no idea what he'd do. But the original fortune emails did not look like private personal emails.
Re: Arrington : "You’re Welcome, You Bastards"
#110This looks like a routine miscommunication that happens all the time in business. Usually you just patch up the misunderstanding and move on. I think Arrington loves to fight, so he escalated it. So what? Why is this on Hacker News?
He didn't escalate it, he was just stubborn. The S&S lawyer escalated with threats of a lawsuit. Then he countered by making the disagreement public.