Born This Way

It's been my not-so-private view for some time now Arrington has consciously turned into a professional troll. While TC had great value a few years back as a news source, the purchase by AOL was IMO the culmination of a steady decline.

I'm not sure if the instigation of flamebait headlines and Gawker level journalism were a natural progression for an expanding media outlet which bases its own self worth on impressions and ad-clicks, or a conscious effort to court the attentions of the big-name acquisitors, but the Techcrunch of 2010 was a noticeable step down from the startup/business related organ of prior years.

Viral content spreading via limited-char media such as Twitter is probably encouraging the troll-headline ("Women don't want to run startups"). We know from the AOL Way missives that the major content farms are encouraging Google-Trend following made-to-order 'reporting' rather than seeking out the new. As TC became the go-to place for 'launch' it has become apparent that cronyism was driving much of the content selection, rather than objective assessment of the startup in question - see Quora vs StackOverflow reporting on TC in recent months.

There was a post a few weeks back on HN of someone wanting to produce a successor to TC - a 'back to the old way' site. Whether they will be successful or not, the interesting fact was the public response was overwhelmingly positive, rather than questioning the rationality of pursuing the idea. At the end of the day, it's just a blog. Crunchbase is great, Disrupt is valuable, but if the anchoring blog loses its way, the associated properties will be usurped by someone else.

In that case I would expect to see more laser related articles.

I don't know if you folks are aware of this but Steve Gillmor in his previous career was a record producer — he worked with everyone from Firesign Theater to Grace Jones. That's why is writing is so filled with references to music. You can say what you want about Techcrunch but Gillmor is one of the writers they have who is still worth reading. He doesn't give a damn about chasing page views and if you read in between the lines he often has something interesting to say. And his charm is that he doesn't give a damn about the trolls in the comments section.

Also each generation of technology has its publication: In a sense if Techcrunch is feeling dated it's because we're entering a new era. Once upon a time in the web 1.0 era we were reading Slashdot, F*cked Company, InfoWorld, MacWeek, the Silicon Alley Reporter a few others that are pretty much non-existent today. If Techcrunch is now dead so is Web 2.0 in a sense (and other brands of that era like SXSW, Mashable, etc.).

well I must admit, if I worked for TC and had to deal with their comment crew, I'd probably be firing rounds my now.