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Tech, Crunched: How the go-to site for startup news lost its way

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Re: Tech, Crunched: How the go-to site for startup news lost its way

#31

Post by brandur »

brigadier132 wrote: post #18

> White dude CEOs like Brian Armstrong and Jesse Powell came out hard against DEI efforts and even paid employees to leave, which led, incidentally, to morale at their companies so low it could be measured in millisieverts. But they were making money, baby, so it was all good. > So, by all measures, Alexandr Wang’s MEI bullshit was just that, bullshit Amazing, I don't think he gets it. His rant about white dudes whil…

Also notable that the author didn't link Haje's (the TechCrunch person who railed against Alexander Wang) actual writing because he knew it doesn't make either Haje, or his argument in favor of Haje, look good. So, here it is:

https://web.archive.org/web/20240628212036/https://techcrunc...

The Pulitzer Prize-worthy content in question:

> I would invite him — and those supporting them — to fuck all the way off. You misunderstand me. You thought I wanted you to fuck only partially the way off. Please, read my lips. I was perfectly clear: Off you fuck. All the way. Remove head from ignorant ass, then fuck all the way off.

This is the quality of writing whose loss the author is arguing is why TechCrunch has lost its global relevance. A perfect inversion of the truth if I've ever seen one.

Re: Tech, Crunched: How the go-to site for startup news lost its way

#32

Post by unsupp0rted »

brigadier132 wrote: post #18

> White dude CEOs like Brian Armstrong and Jesse Powell came out hard against DEI efforts and even paid employees to leave, which led, incidentally, to morale at their companies so low it could be measured in millisieverts. But they were making money, baby, so it was all good. > So, by all measures, Alexandr Wang’s MEI bullshit was just that, bullshit Amazing, I don't think he gets it. His rant about white dudes whil…

He doesn't get it. Any time one starts a sentence with "[Skin/ethnicity color] dude CEOs", that's a dead giveaway.

In his world because it's "white" it's punching-up/innocuous.

Re: Tech, Crunched: How the go-to site for startup news lost its way

#33

Post by calmbonsai »

karolist wrote: post #7
renewiltord wrote: post #2

They still have a lot of market power. To get placed in them you need to go through a marketer with contacts and that costs quite a bit of money. They publish all this junk stuff but it's just to get more eyeballs. Centralization of this stuff means that these gatekeepers become more valuable. A real pity.

do they really matter anymore? I remember them from the pre 2010 days but even then it seemed to me like linkedin for startups just without the social network thing, i.e. suits posting boring things. These days I can't remember clicking an article linking there ever.

Even before the acquisition, any TC article was viewed as a "negative signal" in my circles. They were a classic pay-to-play non-journalism rag for generating PR spin or, worse, cabal "take-down" pieces. They absolutely deserve all the irrelevance they've earned.

Re: Tech, Crunched: How the go-to site for startup news lost its way

#34

Post by tootie »

mudil wrote: post #30

Speaking as an MD, as someone who founded a medical technology blog in 2004, and closed it this year. Not only TC collapsed but the whole blogosphere collapsed. The independent journalism has collapsed. When Google and others take your content, crawl your site, store your data, use it and resuse it to serve targeted ads on memes, the journalism becomes a useless pursuit without salary. Google destroyed the internet.…

Yeah, this exactly. VCs fueled by low interest rates sold the world on free content forever and when the well dried up, all the legacy businesses that wanted to invest in quality and human capital were left holding the bag. It isn't just independent journalism that's suffering. Local journalism and even former stalwarts like Newsweek or Forbes have gone to pot.

Re: Tech, Crunched: How the go-to site for startup news lost its way

#35

Post by forgetfulness »

nuz wrote: post #26

I'd like to continue on the narrative here but the truth is kind of that tech itself hasn't really had much exciting things to report on in the ~2017 to now period. If I were in their shoes I'd probably switch reporting to anti tech as well.

Since then it's been dominated by advancements in generative AI, which mostly appeals the get-rich-quick types that were also into cryptocurrency speculation. At least generative AI does produce _something_ today, at the cost of tremendous amounts of electricity and pushing humans out of office jobs to food preparation and delivery.

After all this proletarization of knowledge workers is normalized, hopefully the new AI Robber Barons will leave us some sick public libraries or some equivalent, at least.

Re: Tech, Crunched: How the go-to site for startup news lost its way

#36

Post by decremental »

brigadier132 wrote: post #18

> White dude CEOs like Brian Armstrong and Jesse Powell came out hard against DEI efforts and even paid employees to leave, which led, incidentally, to morale at their companies so low it could be measured in millisieverts. But they were making money, baby, so it was all good. > So, by all measures, Alexandr Wang’s MEI bullshit was just that, bullshit Amazing, I don't think he gets it. His rant about white dudes whil…

[dead]

Re: Tech, Crunched: How the go-to site for startup news lost its way

#37

Post by [deleted] »

mudil wrote: post #30

Speaking as an MD, as someone who founded a medical technology blog in 2004, and closed it this year. Not only TC collapsed but the whole blogosphere collapsed. The independent journalism has collapsed. When Google and others take your content, crawl your site, store your data, use it and resuse it to serve targeted ads on memes, the journalism becomes a useless pursuit without salary. Google destroyed the internet.…

[deleted]

Re: Tech, Crunched: How the go-to site for startup news lost its way

#38

Post by ToucanLoucan »

baxtr wrote: post #29
PedroBatista wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even by Bay Area standards, the last decade and a half has been beyond obscene by the amount and level of douchebags created and their most asinine takes and sins. As time passes like in everything we tend to forget the bad things and imagine the past with rose colored glasses when the borrowing rates were essentially zero. But then you interact with one of "those key people" from that era, and dear Lord.. your soul…

Then there are the hard working people commuting every day to their jobs optimizing the products we use daily. There are many companies like that in the valley too. They just don’t get the attention they deserve. That’s one of the reasons I miss Steve Jobs. He delivered so much value but could also play the attention game so well.

Steve Jobs is the progenitor of the species of well-spoken douchebag that now infests our industry. Don't get me wrong, the turnaround he pulled off with Apple is fucking incredible and a story for the business ages, but Jesus Christ, it is so clear now that every startup CEO is desperate to be Steve Jobs, but lacking the vision that he had, resort merely to mimicking his (likely disordered) personality. Shouting at subordinates, fostering a culture of fear, and generally just being an absolute asswipe to work with.

When you have the absolutely astonishing insight into how to create and dominate markets like he had, and the numerous strokes of luck, not to mention the engineering mind of Wozniak to bring your insane ideas to life, you can get away with it. If you have anything short of that, running the Jobs playbook will get you nowhere, and rightfully so.

Edit: And that's not even touching his personal life, which was absolute trash fire.

Re: Tech, Crunched: How the go-to site for startup news lost its way

#39

Post by Scoundreller »

mudil wrote: post #30

Speaking as an MD, as someone who founded a medical technology blog in 2004, and closed it this year. Not only TC collapsed but the whole blogosphere collapsed. The independent journalism has collapsed. When Google and others take your content, crawl your site, store your data, use it and resuse it to serve targeted ads on memes, the journalism becomes a useless pursuit without salary. Google destroyed the internet.…

I truly believe that Google de-ranked most blogs. Used to be they would put a mix of results (some blogs, even small time ones, some forums, some official sites) so that you’d probably get whatever you were looking for on pg1.

Now it’s far more corporate.

I probably shouldn’t have ranked as high as I did on my Joe Blow blog with better directions to my local passport office or phone numbers for my bank (because the bank’s website sucks and does anything but give you their phone number). But I could often make 1st, 2nd or 3rd result until I didn’t. My content was objectively more useful.

For a while, every Google update that people complained about just bumped me higher. Oh well.

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