

Born This Way - OoTheNigerian
http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/20/born-this-way/

======
zaidf
Once upon a time, TechCrunch was about start-ups and gosh they were killing
it. I miss those days! Anyone else?

That said, I'm assuming their change in direction over the years has been a
business decision. I will always respect that even if it means less TC for me.

~~~
bmelton
<http://thestartupfoundry.com>. What's old is new again. Paul Hontz had those
exact same feelings, and has brought forth a blog that is closer to what TC
used to be than any other I've seen.

~~~
sgrove
Hard to get their attention though. 3 emails, some tweets, and they've yet to
reply.

Suppose everyone's busy, and persistence pays off.

~~~
g0atbutt
Email me again (Paul@codesketch.com). It's nothing personal, we just get A LOT
of email. We are looking at ways to improve response time. Sorry about that.

~~~
sgrove
Heh, no problems. Like I said, I planned to be persistent. You might think of
a way to manage responses automatically so the sender knows you at least
received it, to keep relations good.

And, as I've mentioned before, I'm a huge fan of what you're doing, and how
you're doing it.

------
tomwalsham
It's been my not-so-private view for some time now Arrington has consciously
turned into a professional troll. While TC had great value a few years back as
a news source, the purchase by AOL was IMO the culmination of a steady
decline.

I'm not sure if the instigation of flamebait headlines and Gawker level
journalism were a natural progression for an expanding media outlet which
bases its own self worth on impressions and ad-clicks, or a conscious effort
to court the attentions of the big-name acquisitors, but the Techcrunch of
2010 was a noticeable step down from the startup/business related organ of
prior years.

Viral content spreading via limited-char media such as Twitter is probably
encouraging the troll-headline ("Women don't want to run startups"). We know
from the AOL Way missives that the major content farms are encouraging Google-
Trend following made-to-order 'reporting' rather than seeking out the new. As
TC became the go-to place for 'launch' it has become apparent that cronyism
was driving much of the content selection, rather than objective assessment of
the startup in question - see Quora vs StackOverflow reporting on TC in recent
months.

There was a post a few weeks back on HN of someone wanting to produce a
successor to TC - a 'back to the old way' site. Whether they will be
successful or not, the interesting fact was the public response was
overwhelmingly positive, rather than questioning the rationality of pursuing
the idea. At the end of the day, it's just a blog. Crunchbase is great,
Disrupt is valuable, but if the anchoring blog loses its way, the associated
properties will be usurped by someone else.

~~~
Vivtek
<http://thestartupfoundry.com/> is the reboot you're thinking of. So far, I've
really found them good. Way better than TC (natch).

~~~
Helianthus16
Yeah, I'm really impressed with g0atbutt's results so far.

~~~
jarin
And the fact that he hasn't yet changed his username.

~~~
g0atbutt
And I never will! Thanks for the support.

------
talbina
I've seen a lot of bad writing online, even in reputable publications. But
I've never seen ANYONE taunt their readers in comments like Steve Gillmor is
doing now.

And I can say something like this since I'm the type of person that spends my
weekends reading news and articles.

On the Business Insider, when readers ridicule Henry Blodget about his past,
he responds politely with links and explanations about the accusations against
him.

~~~
schwabacher
His taunts don't even make sense. It seems like he is taking offense to people
criticizing his story anonymously, but the way he is asking people for their
real names comes off as strange and kind of creepy. And, he isn't addressing
any of the (IMO valid) complaints they have about his story.

~~~
nhangen
well I must admit, if I worked for TC and had to deal with their comment crew,
I'd probably be firing rounds my now.

~~~
nhangen
arg, misspelling - _by_ now.

------
rumpelstiltskin
Relevant comment from the article -

 _This seems to be a textbook "AOL Way" article that Paul Miller was talking
about.

Beatles? Popular.

iPad? Popular (Bonus points for featuring FOUR of them).

Lady Gaga? Popular.

Turnaround time? Few minutes.

Actual substance? None whatsoever._

Steve Gilmor's unrelenting jackassery is getting out of hand. Now that TC is
under new management, can someone rein this guy in?

~~~
lwat
What is YOUR real name!?

~~~
socksy
Sorry, I don't understand how that relates to what he said? Could you explain
further?

~~~
burgerbrain
This is how the author of the article has been responding to criticism.

------
nhangen
Good for Arrington that AOL bought them when they were turning to garbage. Bad
for AOL that they didn't see it coming.

I wonder why anyone even reads TC these days.

------
ilamont
I realize that "star" contributors can command more control (and once upon a
time, higher freelance fees) but I am very surprised a TC editor didn't
exercise veto power over this post. It brings down the brand.

In addition, Gillmor's childish comments are positively embarrassing, and go
against the spirit of Techcrunch's own comment policy, which states "please
think of the comments as a conversation between individuals and interact with
civility." (<http://techcrunch.com/techcrunch-comment-policy/>)

------
noonespecial
Heh. They can't all be winners can they? Based on this article, I'd say they
jumped it, hired it, and now its writing articles for them.

~~~
shantanubala
I'm still trying to wrap my head around what the hell I just read.

So let me get this straight: the author of the article has an argument with
his daughter about Lady Gaga, which leads to his daughter getting her iPad and
hijacking his AirPlay, which leads to a "kids these days" type of commentary,
which leads to him talking about how he missed his deadline.

Which startup is he "obsessively profiling?" Is this a metaphor for something?
I feel like I'm the butt of a joke for even visiting TechCrunch.

~~~
biot
... which leads to people calling TechCrunch out for the useless article,
which leads to him getting all creepy with those commenting, asking for their
real names, and implying that finding out people's names is his homework for
next week.

I, too, used to at least skim almost every article on TechCrunch back when it
was all about startups as it was often the first site to highlight a new
company or reveal mergers, acquisitions, key hires, etc. At some point, it
crossed my personal "quality" threshold and got lumped together with Gawker
Media type of sites where sensationalism trumps quality. I'm sure it's more
profitable, but kind of a shame for the technical community.

~~~
burgerbrain
I advise that people flag his creepy as shit comments as the inappropriate
comments they are.

------
fuzzmeister
I have always found Gillmor's writing absolutely impenetrable. His posts
meander and never seem to arrive at anything resembling a point. I almost feel
like he intentionally avoids making points.

~~~
shareme
it reminds me of Greatfull Dead concerts..never the same meander every
session..

------
bpeters
Maybe it is less that they jumped the shark and more that they tried and
missed, thus being eaten alive by the shark.

Or they really believe that writing about anything is better than writing
nothing.

------
ENOTTY
>Now it’s Sunday morning and I’m ten minutes past my deadline.

And now we know why.

------
soulclap
OoTheNigerian: what's your real name?

That aside: Wow. I thought this would link to an article that might have a
flaw or two or was not 'acceptable' from some cutting edge geek snob POV.
(Sorry for expecting something along these lines on HN, I am new around here!)

But this is really the absolutely worst article I have ever seen on a tech-
related site - including sites that never even had any 'rep' for a start, as
opposed to TechCrunch - plus the author is definitely being mad creepy in the
comments.

------
Kylekramer
Eh, it is just what happens when a tech site reaches a certain point of
popularity. In the early days, a site fights to be unique and high quality to
get the hits. Once a certain level of hits is assured, there is a weird switch
where since every post is going have a certain number of views, the writers
start to care less about quality and get into a feedback loop that tells them
they still are doing well cause they are getting hits. And even worse, the
outliers like Steve's strange ramblings and MG's flamebait are seen as better
cause the novelty drives more attention to them than a normal, well researched
and written post.

I still find it entertaining, but you just can't take it seriously. It is
probably best if you never do.

------
clark-kent
No, they haven't jumped the shark. You were just exposed to Steve Gillmor's
writing. While the article is pointless, its one of his more coherent posts.
He has written much worse TC articles than this.

------
Bossman
What the hell was that? I'm sorry for the bluntness of my statement, but that
"article" was crap.

~~~
shareme
that was TC torturing new interns..their readers :)

------
hartror
I think it is just weak writing, the story seems to be about new technology
and how we interact with it, which is fair TechCrunch fodder. However the
opening sentences provide no hook and no solid message as to what the article
is about. On top of that the writing style is something out of a Sunday
magazine, rambling, relaxed and undirected.

Though it was posted on Sunday so . . .

------
benologist
TC writes whatever will generate ad impressions or curry favor with someone
they wish would like them, and AOL's acquisition makes that official policy.

I really hope the guys at <http://thestartupfoundry.com/> keep at it and
become a significant presence.

------
Zakuzaa
Their feedburner subscribers count has reduced to half of what it was few
months ago. (4000k to 2000k).

------
nhebb
No, they haven't jumped the shark. Happy Days started to suck long before
Fonzie jumped the shark tank. That episode was just the final straw.
TechCrunch isn't that bad - as long as you pick and choose which articles to
read. If you're wasting time reading every TechCrunch article linked to by HN,
then you have bigger concerns than whether the articles are consistently high
quality.

Maybe HN article submitters could do us a favor and bracket the author's name
in the title for those of us that have biases for or against certain writers
at TC, NYT, etc.

~~~
petercooper
Agreed. If you stick to Arrington, Rao, Butcher, and a couple of others, you
get some good content. There are just a few 'bad apples' there who drag it
down.

------
mkr-hn
He seems to have taken the opening paragraphs for several iPad articles and
squished them together.

Maybe it's an experiment in creating articles out of scraps.

------
KeyBoardG
I only started reading tc about a year ago and even in this amount of time
I've seen the downturn. Steve and alexytosis(whatever) both write meaningless
dribble.

------
technomancy
Hardly news. Everything that need be said about TC was covered years ago in
Giles Bowkett's post: [http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2008/05/never-hate-
only-eve...](http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2008/05/never-hate-only-ever-
destroy.html)

------
nl
It's not Techcrunch, it's Steve Gillmore. I'd say he'd jumped the shark, but
that would imply at once point he actually said something sensible.

------
gyardley
Why does snarky title editorializing have this many upvotes? Do we really want
this showing up on the front page of HN every time someone reads a TechCrunch
post they dislike?

Steve Gillmor is nothing but himself - love him or hate him, his writing style
hasn't changed. There's nothing new here to complain about.

------
chailatte
Long time ago. Probably 2008.

I am pretty sure most people are submitting techcrunch articles just for karma
points. That and they come standard with aggressive linkbaiting headlines.

~~~
OoTheNigerian
I don't really need Karma points for anything. Maybe I should just have
written a 2 sentence post with the submission title and put a link to the TC
article.

I just thought this was shorter.

~~~
IsaacL
I can vouch that I know Oo personally, and he didn't submit this for easy
karma. Not sure why he _did_ submit it, though...

~~~
OoTheNigerian
_Not sure why he did submit it, though..._

Maybe the frustration knowing that I will never get my 5 mins back and hoping
that the guys at TC get the feedback. :)

------
drivebyacct2
Steve Gillmor is a child. The last article I read by him, he was stalking and
creeping on people in the comments. It was very, very weird and the comments
on this article seem to imply that he's at it again.

Seriously, I don't care for TC, but they need to get this jackass under
control. After mentioning that he was responding immaturely to commenters, he
replied with "What is your real name?".

[http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/13/close-or-
view/#comment-1458...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/13/close-or-
view/#comment-145823647)

------
jawartak
One word: pageviews.

------
shareme
Guys, TC is a tech site right? Than why do they not validate the email when
you want to comment? Epic FAIL!

------
michaelpinto
I don't know if you folks are aware of this but Steve Gillmor in his previous
career was a record producer — he worked with everyone from Firesign Theater
to Grace Jones. That's why is writing is so filled with references to music.
You can say what you want about Techcrunch but Gillmor is one of the writers
they have who is still worth reading. He doesn't give a damn about chasing
page views and if you read in between the lines he often has something
interesting to say. And his charm is that he doesn't give a damn about the
trolls in the comments section.

Also each generation of technology has its publication: In a sense if
Techcrunch is feeling dated it's because we're entering a new era. Once upon a
time in the web 1.0 era we were reading Slashdot, F*cked Company, InfoWorld,
MacWeek, the Silicon Alley Reporter a few others that are pretty much non-
existent today. If Techcrunch is now dead so is Web 2.0 in a sense (and other
brands of that era like SXSW, Mashable, etc.).

~~~
burgerbrain
The music references are not the issue here. Read the comments this tool is
making to people who are (rightfully) giving him criticism.

