251–260 of 373 posts
As long as the valuation keeps going up, the VC's will keep making excuses and looking the other direction. Remember, profits make everything all better.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the same story that they talk about digging up dirt on reporters' families, Uber revealed details of a different reporter's movements to her, without her consent, and supposedly an impossible thing to do. Is it such a stretch to think that revealing details about your family + revealing details about your movements and location could also = revealing details about the movements and location of your family? Again,…
Sarah Lacy is hardly a reliable witness. The whole reason she got involved is because Emil Michael got frustrated with her hit pieces. And if your claim to fame is writing hit pieces, of course an incident like this is going to land right in your wheelhouse and you're going to make hay of it. Don't misunderstand me here--I just think there are two sides to this story, and both sides are assholes.
1) How does someone being annoyed by a story make the reporter unreliable?
2) Why would they be in full damage control mode over the earlier articles or this one if they weren't true?
Personally, I've stopped using Uber because of the lack of the company/management's lack of ethics. Lyft comes off as a much friendly, consumer-focused company & frankly, my experiences have been better in a Lyft than an UberX. Also - I'm not one to usually browse Buzzfeed, but this was their story to break, so props to them for getting it out there.
The thing that’s crazy is that Uber’s service is terrific. They can succeed quite handily in the market without resorting to this sort of bullshit (like that crazy caper where they asked drivers to make phony ride reservations on competing services). I think Yglesias has the right take — the very qualities necessary to make an legally-grey service successful are going to become antithetical to them succeeding as a no…
But they've raised money at a $17 billion+ valuation, from people who invested on the theory that they at least have a shot at a x5 profit -- so they need to target a valuation of $100 billion or so.
Which means that "make a popular service that people use and which has value and that is capable of turning a sustained profit" is now abject failure for them.
Success for Uber looks like "become part of the fundamental infrastructure of large parts of the world." It is NOT clear that they are on track to do that, and failure to do that is a real possibility, in a way that "failure to have a popular service that can make money" is not really a possibility.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's possible he's pissed of at Sarah Lacy for reasons other than that she's a woman.
Well, he's pissed at a woman journalist accusing his company of sexism and misogyny. He said so. This is already a gendered incident. So sure, it's possible that he'd also talk about destroying a male journalist for the same thing. Heck, it's possible that he has the bodies of a dozen journalists, all male, buried in his back yard. But given that this was already about sexism and misogyny, given Uber's notoriously do…
If I say: "I wish that guy/girl would get exposed" - that's a pretty non-specific statement. You can laugh that one off and it can be spun all kinds of ways. If I say: "I should dig up dirt on that person" - that's much more specific, but not always. It's harder to ignore and it's far more difficult to put a just-kidding spin on it. If I say: "I should spend a million dollars and hire four researchers to dig up oppos…
Attempting to blackmail the press if they challenge your company's PR? Specifically targeting parents' worst fears by threatening to reveal details of the location of their children? Openly rifling through the location metadata of another female journalist, a customer of theirs, without her consent? Implicitly saying they'll leak customer data of Uber customers who are journalists, the kind of thing that can potentia…
If I say: "I wish that guy/girl would get exposed" - that's a pretty non-specific statement. You can laugh that one off and it can be spun all kinds of ways. If I say: "I should dig up dirt on that person" - that's much more specific, but not always. It's harder to ignore and it's far more difficult to put a just-kidding spin on it. If I say: "I should spend a million dollars and hire four researchers to dig up oppos…
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Attempting to blackmail the press if they challenge your company's PR? Specifically targeting parents' worst fears by threatening to reveal details of the location of their children? Openly rifling through the location metadata of another female journalist, a customer of theirs, without her consent? Implicitly saying they'll leak customer data of Uber customers who are journalists, the kind of thing that can potentia…
I'm writing this as a throwaway because this feels like mob and pitchforks. I'm a regular here and have no ties to Uber except using it. This whole story feels like they took a frustrated guy venting at dinner and making it into a conspiracy. Meanwhile, Sarah Lacey comments publicly and insultingly on people's political positions, emotions, and dating life. What the man said was very stupid. But it feels a lot like,…
b) The page view journalism model rewards writers for being inflammatory and exaggerating. This means you really need to keep a close eye on writers for disinformation because when something spreads, it happens really fast, within hours. Rather than lengthy investigative pieces, the model is basically a fire hose of shit and watching which chunk sticks and goes viral. This also means writers tend to produce volumes of articles attacking the same or similar individuals and organizations. Some of the ludicrous stories I've seen recently track back to writers with minimal to no credentials and a long stream of irrelevant "stories." One piece of shit stuck and it blows up. What these guys are doing is more closely analogous to trolling and hate speech than informed research.
I'm not the kind of person who imagines the world is constantly devolving towards a lower state. I think the negatives from the current nature of "journalism" are outweighed by the positives we have gained from the same communications & publishing trends.
The best thing you can do as an individual is to not read stories from these sorts of groups. The headlines are misleading, the stories are often irrelevant and misinformed. Stick to places that publish accurate titles and require writers with some sort of credentials.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sarah Lacy is hardly a reliable witness. The whole reason she got involved is because Emil Michael got frustrated with her hit pieces. And if your claim to fame is writing hit pieces, of course an incident like this is going to land right in your wheelhouse and you're going to make hay of it. Don't misunderstand me here--I just think there are two sides to this story, and both sides are assholes.
> Sarah Lacy is hardly a reliable witness. The whole reason she got involved is because Emil Michael got frustrated with her hit pieces 1) How does someone being annoyed by a story make the reporter unreliable? 2) Why would they be in full damage control mode over the earlier articles or this one if they weren't true?
2) The thing about bad PR is that it doesn't have to be true. Regardless, I'm not even talking about the basic facts reported by Buzzfeed. I'm talking about Sarah's interpretation of them as a threat against her children, which is unwarranted by the original report and likely her own sensationalism.