
Silicon Valley Elite Discuss Journalists Having Too Much Power in Private App - zdw
https://www.vice.com/en_in/article/n7w3zw/silicon-valley-elite-discuss-journalists-having-too-much-power-in-private-app
======
dang
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23718317](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23718317)

------
product50
If ever there was a one sided article, it was this. Doesn't even talk about
the nuances of the problems. Journalists are like how dare tech people are
criticizing us - but it is totally ok to do it the other way round. The
difference now though is, because of social media, prominent tech
personalities have much bigger audiences.

Sometimes I am thankful like services like Twitter and Facebook exists since
these types of biases are for everyone to see and make independent calls on.
Before, it would have been like whatever NYTimes said would be taken as the
truth as there would have been no platform available to present your pov.

~~~
ryanhuff
If I took what Facebook presents to me through my feed as a news source to
influence my POV, I might believe that Obama is a secret Muslim, or that Trump
was done away with years ago, and is instead an alien, or that Helen Hunt, the
actress, is involved in international child trafficking, or perhaps that
COVID-19 was put in place to control the world's population. In my experience,
all Facebook does is reveal and feed upon people's worst needs, desires,
fears. I'll take the NY Times over this any day of the week.

~~~
catalogia
It's not like the NYTs doesn't have a history of spreading unfounded
'conspiracy theories' too:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraqi_aluminum_tubes#September...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraqi_aluminum_tubes#September_2002_claims)

In terms of damage done to society, I think all the examples you list combined
still pale in comparison to that single example.

~~~
ryanhuff
Perhaps. The NYT is one source published daily. Facebook has millions of
conversations happening among friends and loose connections happening daily
about supposed conspiracy theories. I propose that the scale that results from
the viral nature of this distribution dwarfs what the NYT could possibly do.

------
ciarannolan
> On Wednesday night, the topic of conversation was Lorenz herself, who had
> been listening earlier in the conversation but left partway through. After
> she left, the participants began discussing whether Lorenz was playing "the
> woman card" when speaking out about her harassment following a Twitter
> altercation with Srinivasan.

> "You can't fucking hit somebody, attack them and just say, 'Hey, I have
> ovaries and therefore, you can't fight back,'" Felicia Horowitz, founder of
> the Horowitz Family Foundation and wife of Andreessen Horowitz cofounder Ben
> Horowitz, said.

[...]

> "Is Taylor afraid of a brown man on the street? Then she shouldn't be afraid
> of a brown man in Clubhouse," Srinivasan said. "I have literally done
> nothing other than one previous tweet. Number one, right? So the whole, you
> know, talking about tweeting as you know, harassment—completely
> illegitimate, completely wrong, completely fabricated and just false."

[...]

> "When it comes to our industry, there’s a really, really toxic dynamic that
> exists right now," Nait Jones, an Andreessen Horowitz VC, said on the call
> while speaking about recent reports about abuse in the tech industry.
> "Because those stories were so popular and drove so much traffic, they also
> created a market for more of those stories. They created a pressure on many
> reporters to find the next one of those stories inside of a fast growing
> tech company because those stories play very well on Twitter, especially
> around protecting vulnerable people."

1\. The lack of self awareness is incredible.

2\. What happened to us? Were people always this nasty and identitarian?

~~~
tossmeout
I fail to see how any of the quotes you provided are nasty or lack self-
awareness.

~~~
bluntfang
(capital M, T) Me Too

------
fossuser
This article is missing some of the critical context that lead to this from
Twitter.

Summarized here: [https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-July-2020-Twitter-spat-
bet...](https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-July-2020-Twitter-spat-between-
Taylor-Lorenz-and-Balaji-S-Srinivasan-really-about)

I think Taylor comes across extremely negatively here and the spin in this
Vice article just makes it worse.

Basically Taylor puts up a mean tweet about the Away CEO’s comments on the
media (without actually engaging in the content of those comments).

Balaji responds to the tweet with the same wording Taylor used, but directed
at Taylor herself (to point out the meanness).

Taylor tweets a cropped response image of only Balaji’s response and plays
victim, rallying media people behind her (things escalate) - eventually they
surreptitiously record this clubhouse conversation and write a hit piece
without taking any responsibility for anything.

It’s all very high school and the journalists come across extremely negatively
to me. If anything this proves Balaji’s point.

I should spend less time on Twitter.

~~~
Pils
The Quora piece contains a lot of conjecture on the part of the author, who
clearly has an ax to grind with the media. If you don't believe the conspiracy
that "the Verge media outlet is specifically targeting female founders" the
argument completely falls apart.

If you read the original Away article, Korey clearly crossed multiple lines
and was creating a toxic work environment. As a tech worker, I think its right
and good for people covering tech to "call out" this sort of revisionist
history.

~~~
fossuser
I don’t disagree that the original Away article showed bad behavior.

Both things can be true though, the slack messages/toxic environment from
Korey in that first article can be bad _and_ it can be wrong for Taylor to
mean tweet without addressing the content of any of Korey’s points about the
media (which are valid), and everything Lorenz did to escalate and mislead
from there can be wrong too.

For clarity the media comments Korey wrote that kicked this recent thing off
are separate from that original article.

I have even less confidence that the original Away article is entirely true
now given the journalist behavior around this second issue.

~~~
Pils
I'm unsure how the supposed bad behavior on Taylor's part reduces your
confidence in the original Away article, which was written by a completely
separate journalist, but I'm sure you have a good reason to make such an
inference.

I fundamentally believe we are approaching this incident from fundamentally
different perspectives. I saw Taylor's original tweet as a form of "correcting
the record" in response to Korey's obvious spin on the whole thing, rather
than trying to open a debate on media-tech relations (which is what it became
ultimately due to Balaji's derailment). It's unfortunate that Taylor's tweet
contained incorrect information on Korey's current job status, but that
appeared to be a minor issue to me, but in other contexts could be construed
as "misleading". You seem to be of the perspective that this incident is a
symptom of a larger, systemic issue in journalism, an issue I have a lot of
sympathy towards, so by all means go off.

~~~
fossuser
I think Taylor could have engaged directly on the content of what Steph said,
as well as point out the context from the previous article that could be a
potential cause of motivated reasoning to keep in mind when considering
Steph’s arguments.

That would have been professional and reasonable.

The tweet Taylor wrote was neither of those things and proved Korey’s point
more than if Taylor had said nothing.

------
s1artibartfast
This article is a great example of the phenomenon being discussed. The article
intentionally misleads the reader and distorts statements. For example, look
at the selective omission from Nait Jones statement. They were clearly trying
to portray him as categorically opposed to journalists reporting on abuse.

>"When it comes to our industry, there’s a really, really toxic dynamic that
exists right now,"

 _Next sentence omitted: There were very very impactfull stories about abuse
inside fast growing tech companies, that proved to be very valuable stories,
that stopped that abuse from happening._

>"Because those stories were so popular and drove so much traffic, they also
created a market for more of those stories. They created a pressure on many
reporters to find the next one of those stories inside of a fast growing tech
company because those stories play very well on Twitter, especially around
protecting vulnerable people."

------
encoderer
Every VC nerd tweeting about Clubhouse reminds me of the Robert Scoble
influencer strategy for the Google Glass.

~~~
askafriend
This is one of the best takes I've seen. Ahh....Scoble....I remember those
days.

~~~
protomyth
I think the peek was an episode essentially about cut-and-paste and on the web
which had something to do with Ray Ozzie on the Gilmore Gang.

------
TimTheTinker
The writer of this article is a _journalist_ , so the portrayal may be less
than fair.

That being said, and speaking generally (not about VCs or rich people in
particular), something is going terribly wrong when a private person can be
publicly shamed in the press 15 years from now for doing something that is
completely normal and socially acceptable _today_ , and lose their job as a
result.

~~~
bluntfang
So as long as you do bad shit and get away with it for 15 years no one should
judge you for it?

~~~
pmorici
Not what the OP said. Even the US constitution recognizes that Ex post facto
laws are bad and specifically prohibits their passage.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_post_facto_law#United_State...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_post_facto_law#United_States)

~~~
dragonwriter
> Even the US constitution recognizes that Ex post facto laws are bad and
> specifically prohibits their passage.

 _Ex post facto_ is a term of art in criminal law; and the prohibition has
everything to do with the type of consequences that are uniquely applied in
the criminal context.

It does not reflect a general rule that there is no liability for wrongs
determined after-the-fact, but is a special exception to the general rule that
such liability is acceptable.

~~~
pmorici
Yes, but it is a recognition that there is a certain general unfairness to
holding someone to account for something which society found perfectly fine at
the time it took place only to be made wrong after the fact.

------
renewiltord
The kind of journalism that these people do is dead as a professional
information-delivery job because it is outcompeted by obsessive bloggers since
the advent of the ubiquitous Internet. It is an entertainment business and
behaves like an entertainment business, which means that the participants are
incentivized to create buzz, etc.

If your news sources are primarily these, then you’re missing out on a lot of
actionable information. All that stuff is now in private conversations because
the general audience is gotcha-obsessed. P

~~~
ardy42
> The kind of journalism that these people do is dead as a professional
> information-delivery job because it is outcompeted by obsessive bloggers
> since the advent of the ubiquitous Internet.

Eh, not so much. That's not much different than saying that journalism has
been out-competed by the Facebook News Feed. It might be true that they've
"outcompeted" journalism by pulling the rug out from under its revenue model,
but they certainly _haven 't_ out-competed it from an information-delivery
perspective.

Blogs/social media is full of grossly unreliable information, for the most
part due to the lack of professional journalistic standards. If they're
amateur, then they have greatly reduced coverage due to lack of time and
experience. If they're professional, then they've either recreated traditional
journalism (with all the same difficulties) or they exist explicitly as PR to
push some agenda. I'm reminded of the hordes or mattress review blogs that are
mostly owned by or tacking kickbacks from some mattress company or other (see
[https://www.fastcompany.com/3065928/sleepopolis-casper-
blogg...](https://www.fastcompany.com/3065928/sleepopolis-casper-bloggers-
lawsuits-underside-of-the-mattress-wars)).

The idea that blogs could replace journalism is a dated, idealistic, early-00s
idea. The best they ever managed to consistently do was to was replicate the
hot air of the opinion pages. Sure, occasionally amateur blog gets a scoop,
but they're relatively few and far between, separated by chasms of noise.

~~~
renewiltord
In the following sentence from my original post, I intended for the (now)
highlighted section to have semantic significance:

> he kind of journalism _that these people do_

------
tqi
One thing I noticed when browsing the twitter thread where Taylor Lorenz
tweeted about Balaji Srinivasan was the consistency of responses. Every single
response from a verified journalist defended Lorenz and condemned the
Srinivasan tweet, and every single response from a tech person defended
Srinivasan and pointed to Lorenzs own tweet about Stephanie Korey.

As far as I saw, neither side engaged with the other's arguments, and the
battle lines were drawn with remarkable consistency.

~~~
Pils
I didn't really see that. For example, DHH was extremely critical of Balaji's
shenanigans. It seemed like rationalist twitter (most likely due to the anti-
NYT sentiment relating to the SSC drama) + some VCs vs the rest of Online
Twitter. Taylor's beat is usually of the more liminal variety rather than red
meat, culture war content, so this whole situation feels like the result of
misplaced animosity.

~~~
mc13
DHH has always been against the VC culture.

------
DidISayTooMuch
This is just people having conversations about protecting their interest. I'm
sure if we spied on the "non-elite" people talking to their spouses or
friends, there will be some controversial stuff.

I don't even think there's anything controversial here. This is just a fluff
article.

------
ChrisMarshallNY
Meh.

 _" Powerful people complain about journalists. –News at 11"_

This has been going on since the day the first broadsheets were written in
cuneiform.

What matters, is what people _do_ , when it comes to stuff like this. I'd say
the Ebay folks, sending the bloggers pig's head masks was more alarming.

 _“Never argue with a man who buys ink by the barrel.”_ –Mark Twain

------
sukilot
Flagged for petty bickering. I don't understand why people post and upvote
chatter they would be downvoted to oblivion if it were posted as comments on
HN. We can do better.

------
str33t_punk
This article employs the same malicious cropping Taylor Lorenz did that made
people so mad. I think the origin story is not that she complained about the
CEO of Away, it was that when Balaji copied her exact wording, she cropped out
the origin picture that showed this and claimed harassment.

Journalists seem incredibly tone deaf -- do they ever wonder why people
dislike them? It's because they employ so many subtle lies like this all the
time.

Journalists really need to get off twitter - it ruins their credibility. If
this is how they act for some crap drama, it calls into question all sorts of
'important' articles and op-eds

------
rdiddly
Dumb piece about a dumb conversation. But for the record, journalists gain
trust & responsibility by keeping their opinions out of it. If you give free
rein to your silly opinions, all you do is gain the blind obedience of those
who already agree with you, which is easy. Easy. And is the default mode on
Twitter, i.e. the "mooks and knights" model -
[https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2020/01/16/the-internet-of-
beefs/](https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2020/01/16/the-internet-of-beefs/)

Those who want to be treated with respect like real grown-up journalists need
to act like real grown-up journalists and not just common Twitter trash. What
am I supposed to do with something like "Silicon Valley millionaires, who have
been coddled..."? If I'm looking to be outraged and join a mob, I'm all good,
I've reached my destination. If on the other hand I'm looking for
facts/journalism, what should I do at this point? Ask for a source? Where was
the coddling? Who did the coddling? What kind of coddling? When did this
coddling take place? Just asking the usual 5-6 journalistic questions about it
makes you realize how fucking tedious this particular bit of "news" is. It's
actually not news, not a fact. It's a mean-spirited, trashy little aside.
(Does this automatically mean I support "millionaires" exploiting and
demeaning others? No, you idiot.)

Want a grim laugh? Picture Hitler ranting & raving at a podium, and that
sentence appearing as the subtitle. "THEY HAVE BEEN CODDLED AND WILL BE
CODDLED NO MORE!!!" crowd: "Heeeiiill!" Hitler was not a journalist.

All the little side commentary (I'm already too bored to cite other examples
but it does get worse from there) sounds like something out of Idiocracy.
Flagging this for being intellectually beneath us.

------
gadders
This aside from the author of the article made me laugh:

(In 2020, the idea that fishing for “clicks” to drive ad revenue is a
successful or even common business model is a fallacy. Publications that rely
exclusively on advertising are failing at an astonishing rate; financially,
many journalistic outlets are increasingly moving away from an ad-based
revenue model driven by traffic, and instead focus on live events,
subscriptions, optioning their articles to movie studios, and other models
that rely on having a dedicated readership that trusts the publication).

Yes, clickbait is a really uncommon business model, and loads of Vice articles
are being made into movies. The lack of self-awareness is breathtaking.

------
idlewords
Maybe they can use some of the excess power to secure the app

------
chadlavi
2020 in a headline

~~~
medicineman
HN in a headline

------
buboard
too long to read ;

balaji has a beef with mainstream journalists since many months ago, and
probably rightly so. I can't help but feel however that this whole outrage is
covert advertising for Clubhouse which (even though i am not famous enough to
use) seems basically a repackaging of the decades-old concept of phone
hotlines.

That said, balaji is right, the media overplayed their role as arbiters of
truth and are now losing. I d trust my twitter feed better than any paper.

------
lliamander
Legal Analysis: "You really Shouldn't Record Clubhouse Calls"

[https://prestonbyrne.com/2020/07/02/you-really-shouldnt-
reco...](https://prestonbyrne.com/2020/07/02/you-really-shouldnt-record-
clubhouse-calls/)

------
mtgp1000
>The call shows how Silicon Valley millionaires, who have been coddled by the
press and lauded as innovators and disruptors, fundamentally misunderstand the
role of journalism the moment it turns a critical eye to their industry.

No, I would argue that journalists don't understand that their role requires
objectivity, and that the whole industry is broken because it has been
completely dominated by ideologues, top to bottom, who are blatantly pushing
politics onto the masses.

Don't support BLM? Have legitimate criticism? Be prepared to be called out by
"journalists" until you fall in line, if you don't get cancelled first. And
let's be real, this has been the status quo regarding taboo topics for at
least a decade.

Edit: would you all be downvoting if the same journalists were adding pro
Trump spin to a sizable proportion (or majority, depending on the outlet) of
non-editorial (but editorialized) media? I'm not going to support blatantly
partisan writing by ostensibly neutral platforms simply because they represent
my politics. We need objective news and the fact that it is impossible to be
purely objective is not an excuse to deliberately pollute news articles and
headlines with consistent agenda.

~~~
wnevets
> No, I would argue that journalists don't understand that their role requires
> objectivity

Based on what? Objectivity hasn't been required since the printing press was
invented

~~~
cameronbrown
It's required because a democratic society relies on a healthy press. These
are supposed to be scholars, with a code of ethics, dedicated to
documentation. Journalists are not supposed to actually interfere in the
system they are observing (e.g. by calling for de-platforming) because then
they go from being journalists to being activists.

Edit: To be clear, I have no problem with newspapers including opinion
articles about de-platforming, but there must be an acknowledgement that
there's a difference between journalists and activists/thought leaders. We
cannot go on mixing both.

~~~
_jal
You're asking for a state of affairs that had never existed.

De-platforming/cancelling is the hip word at the moment, and powerful people
are getting nervous, because it is the rabble instead of the powerful doing
the canceling.

I have two responses: (1) The amount of self-awareness demonstrated by the
elites tends to be related to how they fair in peasant revolts. (2) People
have short memories, the class-driven state of affairs you prefer will be back
soon enough.

~~~
cameronbrown
> People have short memories, the class-driven state of affairs you prefer
> will be back soon enough.

Are you sure? Can anyone be sure of this? The internet has fundamentally
altered the dynamic with the new Gutenberg revolution. Now the angry mobs have
louder voices than even the largest institutions. Worse, people at these
institutions are encouraging the mob for clickbait driven profit.

The incentives are perverse and it's why a strong code of ethics is essential.

~~~
mtgp1000
With unprecedented power comes unprecedented responsibility.

