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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

#41

Post by wkcheng »

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.…

This may be why things like Substack and Beehiiv have taken off. The only way to combat reposting through Google is to deliver content directly to email inboxes before it gets ranked and reposted.

There is something additional at play with TechCrunch, though. Recently I feel like they haven't been posting as many articles that are about smaller startups as they used to. They tend to post more about Google, Nvidia, Intel, etc. I find myself reading it less and less because it's mostly news that you can also find elsewhere.

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

#42

Post by Kye »

cddotdotslash wrote: post #19
wallflower wrote: post #11

Wow! Techmeme is still around! https://techmeme.com/

I hate seeing Techmeme links because it always guarantees I'll need to click yet another link before getting to the original URL. It's like a useless middleman.

It made more sense before the blogosphere collapsed and you would see lots of unique takes from independent blogs instead of links to a few short posts on a handful of enormous social media sites plus maybe posts from the biggest still surviving sites.

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

#43

Post by realfeel78 »

marban wrote: post #14
PaulHoule wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say NYT and FT have very little coverage of startups and Bloomberg has occasional startups. Techcrunch is still the leader for stories like "Company A has raised $B million to do C" which my friends and I are very interested in when we are interested in C. (e.g. where are you going to find a job doing C? what are the prospects for your own startup idea around C?)

Venturebeat does most of this.

[flagged]

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

#45

Post by julianeon »

This article makes a great point towards the end that I'll repeat here:

There should be another TC-like site reporting on startups now. Specifically there should be a news site about startups that has some critical distance from those startups - at least enough that it doesn't directly financially benefit from my perception of the companies that it's reporting on.

Example, by analogy: I'm interested in news about Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google, Meta. But I don't want to read their PR releases. I want someone to do some filtering on that, because there's too much filler there for me to review it daily.

This seems to be a really hard thing to do right! There's a balance in the reporting that it takes a lot of intelligence and finesse to do right, which is why it seems media co's can't do it forever.

One issue is that it can be too adversarial and too clickbait-y. That is a problem.

But the other issue - and this is the problem afflicting the solutions that I've seen - is the opposite. Too far in the pocket of the companies it's reporting on, and friendly to the point of sleepiness, like sitting in on all-hands you're not being paid to attend. A news site that might as well be called "our venture fund and why the companies we invest in are awesome" isn't it.

I don't think there's a site filling this void right now. TC did a decent job at it, for a while, but there should be a new contender.

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

#46

Post by adamors »

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.

You miss the Steve Jobs that colluded with Google and other big tech companies to keep wages down until they got sued by Department of Justice?

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

#47

Post by encom »

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.…

>the whole blogosphere collapsed

And hopefully with it, the word "blogosphere".

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

#48

Post by floren »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #38
baxtr wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Shouting at subordinates, fostering a culture of fear, and generally just being an absolute asswipe to work with.

This was one of my big takeaways reading through folklore.org: "oh man, I would have hated working for that prick"

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

#49

Post by renewiltord »

calmbonsai wrote: post #33
karolist wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's precisely this. But with the exception that it's a positive signal among old industries that your startup is not 2 guys in a garage. Not companies like John Deere or whatever, but some hundred-million-dollar logistics company in Europe and shit like that.

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

#50

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]
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