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

keepgoingpod.com

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

#61
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…

> at the cost of tremendous amounts of electricity

And the climate. And water. So much water. (Some good reads on that: https://grist.org/technology/the-overlooked-climate-conseque..., https://grist.org/technology/surging-demand-data-guzzling-wa..., and https://themarkup.org/hello-world/2023/04/15/the-secret-wate....)

>some sick public libraries

They won't. One major thing AI does is get you from a question to an answer, like a search engine. But here's the thing: Libraries also do that, and they're good at it (the large ones at least). They do so for free, legally, without using anyone's stuff without consent, without selling your data, and without nearly as big climate concerns. They're a threat to AI (or would be if they weren't already crippled by search engines), and AI doesn't want to keep them around.

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

#62

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 Mic…

I like the idea in concept, but feel you'd run into the same problem 'fair' reviewers run into: if you get too negative for a company's liking, or don't say the given talking points, they'll blacklist you. So other sites get the newest scoops, the convention invites, etc. Why do you think almost every 'top' reviewer on YouTube is so positive on nearly everything? Because the ones who gave fair reviews quit getting ea…

I hadn't considered that: in an age of social media, this kind of review gets a lot harder.

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

#64

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 Mic…

There’s no way to do that in mass market form. If you are too balanced you’ll get torn to bits. No one likes that guy. People like to talk about the media but it’s really responding to audience preferences. For instance, in your case, would you want each article about Google to start with two pages of argumentation on “how terrible their privacy practices are”? Because that’s what the audience wants. You can have tha…

Sadly I think that's the truth.
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