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Hit men, click whores, and paid apologists: Welcome to the Silicon Cesspool

realdanlyons.com

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Re: Hit men, click whores, and paid apologists: Welcome to the Silicon Cesspool

#201

Post by VonGuard »

redcircle wrote: post #179
VonGuard wrote: post #118

Oh... My... God.... Lyons is a fucking god. As a journalist in the valley, I can just say that the first paragraph he's written here hits the nail right on the fucking head. ---"It’s tough being a journalist, especially if you’re covering technology and living in Silicon Valley, because it seems as if everyone around you is getting fabulously rich while you’re stuck in a job that will never, ever make you wealthy. Wh…

It is self limiting to look at it in terms of earning money. Clearly happiness is life's goal --- not money (nor prestige, nor power). If you are smarter, as Lyons says he is, then it should be possible to transcend the environment. I'm not talking Christian-like self abasement. If you try hard enough, you can figure out ascension points to higher planes of understanding and flourishing and self growth. In the proces…

Good advice. But it is indeed, still frustrating. I'm not sure some fo the people here quite understand just how little journalists make...

I mean, yeah I did not get into it for the money, but the Valley feels like a lottery sometimes, and journalists do not get to buy tickets.

Of course, I'm super happy being a journalist. But you gotta admit, it's frustrating to watch all this money fly around while yer struggling to pay rent.

Re: Hit men, click whores, and paid apologists: Welcome to the Silicon Cesspool

#202

Post by apu »

tucson wrote: post #185
grellas wrote: post #177

Silicon Valley once was home to scientists and engineers — people who wanted to build things. Then it became a casino. Now it is being turned into a silicon cesspool, an upside-down world filled with spammers, liars, flippers, privacy invaders, information stealers — and their grubby cadre of paid apologists and pygmy hangers-on. Silicon Valley has not fundamentally changed over the decades and I can say that from th…

It seems to me that someone is whistleblowing on mafia-like behavior... and you comment on the tone.

Lyons sounds more like a rival mafioso to me.

Re: Hit men, click whores, and paid apologists: Welcome to the Silicon Cesspool

#203

Post by [deleted] »

brandnewlow wrote: post #166
ChrisNorstrom wrote: post #136

How about a few of us here get together, throw up a wordpress install, and start a self-serve tech/startup site. I've got RobotSays.com. Basically anyone can be an author, they create a guest post, upload their content and their picture, and submit the post for approval and we the editors fix up anything out of place and approve only the best content for the front page. A lot of design blogs allow guest post submissi…

People are too busy trying to make "product money," not "blog money." Never forget, TechCrunch itself started as a sideproject to help Arrington learn about the startup space while he worked on one of his own.

[deleted]

Re: Hit men, click whores, and paid apologists: Welcome to the Silicon Cesspool

#204

Post by ChrisNorstrom »

nextparadigms wrote: post #138

I'm really surprised that Google trusts and would still let MG Siegler review their products before launch (like they just did with Chrome for Android), when 80% of his posts now are about trashing Google. It's like begging for attention from an abusive boyfriend or father: "Come on, MG..just one little nice word about our new product...please?" They must think that it's better this way, than to give it to someone wh…

Because if they can get him to like their product that would be a huge achievement for them. They want to be the ones that win him over.

Re: Hit men, click whores, and paid apologists: Welcome to the Silicon Cesspool

#205

Post by ChrisNorstrom »

JackdawX wrote: post #148
ChrisNorstrom wrote: post #136

How about a few of us here get together, throw up a wordpress install, and start a self-serve tech/startup site. I've got RobotSays.com. Basically anyone can be an author, they create a guest post, upload their content and their picture, and submit the post for approval and we the editors fix up anything out of place and approve only the best content for the front page. A lot of design blogs allow guest post submissi…

Well, you just invented slashdot. It's fallen by the wayside now, because places like this, with (largely) unmoderated user generated content, can distribute news faster.

I do agree with you, but if HN were so go at news then why does TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb, GigaOm, AllThingsD, Mashable, etc... exist? HN isn't really a content creator, it's a distributor of content that has already been created at those sites mentioned. HN is a great community of news commentators, but HN is terrible at allowing people to generate content and articles themselves.

And those types of content creators (editors) put so much hard work into their pieces they want to find a good home for their articles, a permanent place of existence. People writing guest posts for TC, RWW, GO, ATD, Mash, can just as easily make a post here on HN. But they don't. No one wants to put in so much hard work and research just for it to disappear into the jungle of links and never be found again.

Re: Hit men, click whores, and paid apologists: Welcome to the Silicon Cesspool

#206

Post by ChrisNorstrom »

sumukh1 wrote: post #43
avoutthere wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing is more dangerous to the Valley than threats of force from Washington.

"As a rule, the only thing that can kill a good startup is the startup itself" - http://www.paulgraham.com/superangels.html As a rule, the only thing that can kill a good _ecosystem_ is the _ecosystem_ itself Edit: We live in a democracy. If there is something that stands to significantly harm us, then we should (and can) do something about it. A recent example would be SOPA. The biggest threat we face is not from Wa…

And patents, and litigation, and bureaucracy, etc...

Re: Hit men, click whores, and paid apologists: Welcome to the Silicon Cesspool

#207

Post by gonehome »

cbs wrote: post #168
gonehome wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every industry has people within it that are unethical or try to game the system for their own benefit at the expense of others. If anything the technology industry is unique in how much good it has done, relative to the bad.

If anything the technology industry is unique in how much good it has done, relative to the bad. Every industry makes this rationalization.

No doubt, it's up to us to decide where the balance actually lies.

Re: Hit men, click whores, and paid apologists: Welcome to the Silicon Cesspool

#208

Post by tucson »

jgarmon wrote: post #200
tucson wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is more serious than you make it sound. This article describes a racket that resembles mafia behavior. “Pay seven figures a year to buy a corporate subscription to my newsletter and I’ll say nice things about your company, and when the press needs a quote, I’ll be there to puff you up. Or, don’t buy a subscription and I will bash you relentlessly.”

This is not a new game. "No one gets fired for buying IBM" was born, then later became "No one gets fired for buying Microsoft" on the back of "industry journals" that were more or less the dead-tree version of the rackets Fake Steve is describing. None of this is new. This, more or less, is the history of subscription trade journals in every industry for the last 100 years. Model is thus: Subscribe to our journal, w…

Yes, mafias are not new. The interesting thing is when someone publicly take a public position against (not many people do).

Re: Hit men, click whores, and paid apologists: Welcome to the Silicon Cesspool

#209

Post by vl »

functionform wrote: post #187
vl wrote: post #116

And this is a click-bate title I'm not going to click out of principle.

It isn't click bait. If you follow the network of blogs Dan talks about you saw the blatant self-interest machine hard at work in realtime. I was disgusted by it, but I'm not a tech writer, thus no platform to weigh in on. I'm glad someone picked up on it and gave it to them, and you only have to glance at the comments he got to know that I'm not the only person who felt this way.

Article might be worthy, but this title gives me no insight into the content of the article and thus doesn't allow me to decide if I want to see it or not in a first place. How would I guess that it's about "network of blogs with the blatant self-interest machine"?

Re: Hit men, click whores, and paid apologists: Welcome to the Silicon Cesspool

#210

Post by jarek »

xradionut wrote: post #72
sumukh1 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"As a rule, the only thing that can kill a good startup is the startup itself" - http://www.paulgraham.com/superangels.html As a rule, the only thing that can kill a good _ecosystem_ is the _ecosystem_ itself Edit: We live in a democracy. If there is something that stands to significantly harm us, then we should (and can) do something about it. A recent example would be SOPA. The biggest threat we face is not from Wa…

"We live in a democracy." We don't live in anything close to democracy. It's hard for a populous to change a corrupt system when all the cards are stacked against the greater public.

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/populace noun

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/populous adjective

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