
The Scripto App Became a Fixture of Late-Night Comedy News (2018) - theBashShell
https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/how-scripto-the-app-that-stephen-colbert-helped-build-became-a-fixture-of-late-night-comedy-news
======
btown
Previous discussion from a year ago, with the development team showing up in
the HN thread!
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16110463](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16110463)
\- and a great comment from the original developer here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16111620](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16111620)

~~~
ilaksh
Are you able to see this post on HN anymore? It looks like they removed it. I
assume just because Rob asked them to since it made him look bad.

------
fencepost
Huh, the thing that jumped out at me more was "Oh, that's what Rusty Foster
(of kuro5hin) moved on to."

------
ilaksh
It says Rob Dubbin coded the original version. That is false. I did a lot of
it and Mindy helped with the front end. Rob did not code any of it. And I
solved a lot of hard problems. The fact that he just gives me no credit and
just says it crashed constantly is slander. It did have a problem I couldn't
figure out for a long time with the chat process crashing the server. But it
worked fairly well for them in production despite that issue. I solved the
hard technical challenges and yet he discounted my work and threw me under the
bus. Very unfair. I have no respect for those people.

------
yellowapple

        I asked Dubbin whether he would ever license Scripto to a conservative show.
        “Fox News wouldn’t use it, but I wouldn’t sell it to them,” he said. “I’m not
        interested in making their job easier.”
    

Seems like a prime opportunity for a competitor to come along and advertise to
the other side of the political aisle.

~~~
jessewmc
This jumped out at me too. To a non-American, it seems like everything that is
wrong with American politics: being so unable to empathize with your fellow
Americans that one would treat them as an enemy and refuse to help them in any
way.

~~~
m12k
As a non-American, it looks to me like one of the primary reasons why America
has become so divided and tribal these days is Fox News. It makes a living
selling white working class people their own fear and prejudice back to them
in order to get them to vote against their own economic self-interest. I think
Fox News is one of the few things in this world that you can hate with a pure
heart. Hating its viewers would be different though, and that's not something
I would agree with (in fact I think one of Democrat's top priorities should be
to fund much better public education in rural states) but I don't think that's
what was meant by the quote in the article.

~~~
ralusek
Fox News is cancer, but that is not even beginning to provide a holistic
picture of the political landscape. If you think the left wing has no part in
this, you're misinformed or insane.

You understand that James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose and Peter Boghossian
recently got an academic paper published which was just Mein Kampf excerpts
verbatim, but targeted at white men rather than Jews, correct? They did this
as an exercise to show how radically left academia has gone. Or in regards to
specifically media, look no further than the portrayal of the Covington
Catholic event on your purportedly unbiased news sources, and then watch the
source video for yourself. There is a group of Black Israelites who say to the
MAGA kids that "your money says 'In God We Trust,' and yet you give rights to
F*GGOTS." To which the MAGA kids respond with jeers and "so what, they're
people too." CNN reported the incident as the MAGA kids having approached the
2 Native Americans (untrue) and chanting "build the wall" at them (untrue,
watch the full 2 hour video if you want to). The only mention of the Black
Israelites was that the MAGA students were antagonizing a few "black
preachers."

I hate Fox, I hate Trump, but the left wing is deconstructing foundational
liberal pillars. To lay the entirety of the current political landscape at the
feet of Fox News is just nuts, I'm sorry.

~~~
fatnoah
Politics has always been about the twin pillars of attacking an opponent and
their positions, but we've now reached a point where we attack supporters,
too. Discourse seems to have gone from "You're wrong" to "You're literally the
worst piece of scum for even thinking this way".

Politics has always been dirty business and defaming candidates is not
unusual. The trend towards shaming and dehumanizing candidates' supporters is
what really bothers me.

------
firloop
(2018)

~~~
koolba
I remember reading about this a whiles before 2018.

Found it:
[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-06-17/colbert-r...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-06-17/colbert-
reports-tv-production-software-is-no-joke) (2014)

------
MaggieL
"Learn to code."

~~~
irrational
It sounds like they took their own advice and did just that.

