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An upcoming story about Coinbase

blog.coinbase.com

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Re: An upcoming story about Coinbase

#81

Post by ve55 »

jolux wrote: post #70
ve55 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, I cannot claim to defend Coinbase when I know nothing of the matter. But since news is inherently cherry-picked (after all, one cannot report on literally everything ), there will generally be an inherent slant to the information provided, and such an inherent slant will likely tend more towards an optimization of metrics (clicks, engagement, ad revenue, subscriptions, etc) rather than perfect statistical repre…

This is enormously unfair to the journalistic profession. There are quite a lot of leaps from "it's not possible to report every fact" to "all journalism is slanted for metrics." Journalists like getting a big scoop but the good ones do their due diligence and go to great pains to report fairly and accurately.

I think there may be a mis-understanding; what I mean is that in the very essence of reporting a scoop, they have already chosen to report that event above other events. So the reporting about the given scoop may be 100% fair and honest, but there is still, in the bigger picture, a large statistical bias, since only some types of things qualify as 'worthy of reporting' and get converted to scoops to begin with.

e.g. imagine one news outlet that only reports about homicides, another than only reports about theft, and another that only reports about covid deaths. All three can be perfectly factual, but they still present radically different views of what is wrong with the world to their readers.

Re: An upcoming story about Coinbase

#82

Post by ergocoder »

markdown wrote: post #31
dmix wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being as transparent as possible and investigating complaints as they come up. > three of these people filed complaints during their time at Coinbase. All of those complaints were thoroughly investigated, one through an internal investigation and two by separate third-party investigators Using third parties sounds like a good idea here.

You don't pay a third party to find damaging stuff about your company. Do you really think this third party would ever find something that made Coinbase look bad? Arthur Andersen taught us that two decades ago.

Like financial audit?

Re: An upcoming story about Coinbase

#83

Post by travisoneill1 »

nlh wrote: post #38
gpm wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how the nyt feels about them posting it publicly? Is that something that's going to make them reconsider sharing details in future stories? (I think it was probably the right choice either way given how serious the allegations appear to be, so this is just idle curiosity on my part).

> Is that something that's going to make them reconsider sharing details in future stories? It's a fair question, but I doubt it. While getting a hot scoop and dropping it with a bang is something that feels good (and sells papers, so to speak), it's not the driving force behind how a professional news org works. The NYT is a professional news org. One of the things a professional news orgs does is fact check, get st…

One of the other things a professional news org does is not fire its editorial page manager for printing an opposing viewpoint.

Re: An upcoming story about Coinbase

#84

Post by [deleted] »

ntsplnkv2 wrote: post #25
avolcano wrote: post #17

This is an odd thing to see widely published. I'm at a company that had a rather detailed negative article written about us, and we were warned about it internally shortly before it was published, after the reporter had contacted us with details and questions. However, we didn't go public with a reaction until after it was out, since it seemed rather pointless to respond to something that hadn't been published yet, e…

> It is odd to me that they would preemptively go loud on this "This is gonna be really bad, so we need to get out in front of it." That's what it sounds like to me.

[deleted]

Re: An upcoming story about Coinbase

#85

Post by jolux »

philtar wrote: post #51
drewbug01 wrote: post #27

Well, the whole press release / internal email smells of a company desperately trying to spin what they expect to be a very, very bad article. But this line jumped out at me twice: > To be specific: Although the story will likely allege that a number of Black employees and contractors referenced in the story filed complaints with the company, only three of these people filed complaints during their time at Coinbase.…

> Reading between the lines, I imagine that the complaints workers claim to have filed were ignored by management at some level of the process, or not filed on the right paperwork or something. Reading the lines (instead of between them) tells you that two of the complains were investigated by a third-party which found no evidence of wrong-doing.

Tells you very little. If you pay a third party to investigate you they have a material interest in not finding wrongdoing and not reporting it if they do find it.

Re: An upcoming story about Coinbase

#87

Post by muglug »

jimmygrapes wrote: post #49
drewbug01 wrote: post #27

Well, the whole press release / internal email smells of a company desperately trying to spin what they expect to be a very, very bad article. But this line jumped out at me twice: > To be specific: Although the story will likely allege that a number of Black employees and contractors referenced in the story filed complaints with the company, only three of these people filed complaints during their time at Coinbase.…

It seems to me that Coinbase is well aware of NYT's recent decline from paper of record to race-baiting propaganda, and knows that instead of being factual about numbers NYT will use weasel words to make it seem like Coinbase's entire company is run by "far right extremist racists" or whatever similar language. Of course, only time and the publication of the NYT article will tell, but given their recent track record…

> NYT's recent decline from paper of record to race-baiting propaganda

Good newspapers must always speak truth to power. In a country where white people hold virtually all of it, sometimes that means speaking truth to white power.

You’re sort of telling on yourself if you find that offensive.

Re: An upcoming story about Coinbase

#88

Post by hnracer »

jolux wrote: post #77
hnracer wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not? They would've had intel from current employees who were interviewed about the likely contents, and they claim that a number of the allegations that are likely to be published are false. If I was either innocent or guilty of such allegations, I will want to try to control the narrative ahead of time. Doing so doesn't seem to update our prior beliefs about the probability of guilt, all it shows us is that the…

Because ideally your culture should be strong enough to weather things like these, and your damage control should read more as a statement of facts than "we did nothing wrong," especially when you issue it preemptively.

That's fair enough. They did say that three former Black employees made false allegations though, so there was some specificity there. Although it would be been better to outline what those allegations were and why they were false, in that I certainly agree (and not having done that, it is a bit suspect)

Re: An upcoming story about Coinbase

#89

Post by [deleted] »

jimmygrapes wrote: post #49
drewbug01 wrote: post #27

Well, the whole press release / internal email smells of a company desperately trying to spin what they expect to be a very, very bad article. But this line jumped out at me twice: > To be specific: Although the story will likely allege that a number of Black employees and contractors referenced in the story filed complaints with the company, only three of these people filed complaints during their time at Coinbase.…

It seems to me that Coinbase is well aware of NYT's recent decline from paper of record to race-baiting propaganda, and knows that instead of being factual about numbers NYT will use weasel words to make it seem like Coinbase's entire company is run by "far right extremist racists" or whatever similar language. Of course, only time and the publication of the NYT article will tell, but given their recent track record…

[deleted]

Re: An upcoming story about Coinbase

#90

Post by TerminalWarrior »

peteretep wrote: post #32
ApolloFortyNine wrote: post #10

It's really really hard to prove your not racist. If anyone has any clue as how to do so, please share. They could have waited until the story was published I guess to share this statement, but publishing it preemptively makes sense too I believe (it's an always open entity that is incredibly easy to switch away from). But truly, when you get accused of racism, what can you even do?

> when you get accused of racism, what can you even do? Make sure nobody has any examples of you being racist

What about in the day and age where "silence is violence"? Apparently just trying to not get involved is enough to make a whole company raciest?
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