
Inside Nick Denton's phony, hypocritical class war against tech workers - scilro
http://pando.com/2013/12/26/look-whos-gawking-inside-nick-dentons-phony-hypocritical-class-war-against-tech-workers/
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throwaway_yy2Di
This is a long and very entertaining read. If you want to skip to the main
accusation of hypocrisy, it is:

    
    
        Speaking of facts: While presenting itself as the champion
        of the working classes, the fact is Dentons Gawker empire is
        guilty of almost every crime it accuses the tech industry of
        committing, and several it doesnt. Denton, who now
        encourages others to sneer at Silicon Valleys elite social
        clubs, made his own millions as co-founder of First Tuesday,
        an elite social club which spanned Europe during the first
        dot com boom. While crying foul at the off-shore tax dodging
        of San Francisco tech companies, Gawker Media is registered
        in the Cayman Islands to avoid paying US taxes, an
        arrangement which the New Yorker described as like an
        international money-laundering operation. As Valleywag howls
        that Google interns earn more than you, Gawker Media is
        currently the subject of a class action lawsuit over its
        earlier refusal to pay its own interns a dime for their
        labour. And how about Valleywags mockery of lavish Silicon
        Valley workplaces? Why not ask Denton about that when you
        visit his steampunk office, featuring a lounge area that
        looks like its straight out of the blue pill/red pill scene
        in The Matrix, an office surfboard and a rooftop party deck?
        Business Insider claims its one of the 15 coolest offices in
        tech. And while youre there, make sure to also ask him about
        Gawkers Privilege Tournament, a smug little contest in which
        Gawker readers were invited to vote on which underprivileged
        group (choices include: black, blind, transgender, people
        with AIDS, the homeless, overeducated, and fat) should win
        by virtue of its sweet, sweet moral superiority  or as
        Salons Katrina Richardson called the tournament: a
        shamefully racist, sexist, homophobic and classist attempt
        to silence large swaths of people.

~~~
dopamean
Holy shit.

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jmduke
Jesus, this is scathing.

I think in an abstract and idealized sense, stuff like Valleywag serves the
tech industry by providing the role of watchman and magnifying glass. But on a
post-by-post basis -- and if you think Paul Carr cherry-picked his examples,
go on Valleywag, they're pretty much all just awful posts of out-of-context
tweets -- it fails that goal tremendously. Just like Gawker itself, there are
occasionally very well-put posts and actual newsbreaking -- they broke the
Uber financial data a couple weeks back -- but it's hard to hold them in high
esteem.

On a semi-related note: incredibly glad that HN auto-kills Valleywag links.

~~~
wklauss
> On a semi-related note: incredibly glad that HN auto-kills Valleywag links.

I think censorship is a terrible idea, even when the censored articles come
from places you don't hold in very high esteem.

~~~
zenocon
I don't consider it censorship. I view it as curated content, which is what I
strongly desire. Censorship would mean you or I _couldn 't_ get access to
valleywag to see what it has to say. That clearly is not the case.

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aaronbrethorst
Oh hey look, Pando (well, Paul Carr) has decided to go after Valleywag's
"class warfare" posts. I'm actually surprised it's taken this long. I think
Valleywag has actually made some excellent points over the past few months,
but has also managed to undercut their position by posting a bunch of
irrelevant crap that doesn't matter.

If Sam Biddle actually cares about this stuff, I'd love to see him leave
Gawker and strike out on his own. SV needs someone talking about this topic
regularly.

Pando, being a de facto mouthpiece for today's top tier VCs, doesn't really
carry much credibility on this subject, even though I do like Paul Carr.

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ryguytilidie
The craziest thing to think about is that because a few kids at Instagram were
dicks or because one or two of the thousands of Twitter employees did
something bad, we extrapolate those behaviors to every tech startup worker.

My fiancee and I both work very hard, live in a modest house in the east bay
and volunteer in our community quite a bit. I left San Francisco 2 years ago
after being priced out of affordable living and I have no resentment to anyone
working at a company that provides a lot of perks. So why am I lumped in with
some guy at Instagram driving his Lambo to his mansion? We could not be any
more different, beside the fact that both of the companies we work for are
funded by VCs.

~~~
brown9-2
Is that crazy or just human nature to lump people together based on profession
or what region they live in? It's a good sign of simplistic reasoning.

~~~
coldtea
Or you know, it's not about individual people, but about what they do and
cause AS a profession (or region or whatever).

That is, this or that individual X (say, tourist in remote beach) might be an
OK guy, but the activity of all of them combined might be causing a certain
phenomenon (say, pollute and disturb the beach, alter the local economy
towards dependency on tourism, etc).

~~~
fat0wl
eh comeon tech workers are just people doing a job. the same issues/judgments
apply to any profession (law, finance, journalism) but these guys are clearly
just demonizing tech workers as a group when... they don't really cause
anything en masse, are we blaming them for accepting salaries and being a
little eccentric at times? they are just people with jobs.

this is real misdirected anger as the author points out, simply because tech
workers are doing a _little_ better than most. maybe there is resentment
because people don't respect the work that they do ("they just press buttons
and are overpaid") or there is jealousy because it is a profession where there
is a huge amateur rank (people without degrees who are trying to bootstrap
themselves into the tech world & making less than most of their
college/masters-educated peers). I really think its something along the lines
of this kind of phenomenon. Otherwise why not just complain about predatory
lawyers/financiers etc.

Tech workers are not notoriously predatory so why should they be demonized as
a group...? They are labor for hire, non-unionized at that. if you think they
are harming the world in some other way, it may be better to blame the
businessmen designing the requirement specs, or the users whose interest keeps
the projects funded

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minimax
For the people who read the HN comments before reading the article: This is
like 3000 words from one shitty technology website talking shit about another
shitty technology website. Don't waste your time.

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wavesounds
This is really sad because there is real inequality in this country but its
between the bottom 40% who combined have less wealth then the heirs of
Walmart.

These protestors been have duped into fighting amongst ourselves instead of
focusing on the real problem. Thats why "we are the 99%" was such a powerful
slogan, solidarity is the only way were going to fix the problems in this
country.

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newnewnew
It's not as hard as it sounds to report on Silicon Valley from NYC. It turns
out, you just have to copy and paste tweets, add a bit of snark, and then
contact the tweeter's employer for comment. It probably adds 10k pageviews if
you get someone fired.

It helps that you don't have to be accurate. For example, take this
juxtaposition:

"Anti-Foreigner VC Also Supports Hiring Discrimination" by Sam Biddle[1]

"Y Combinator reaches farther beyond Silicon Valley" \- including startups
from _22_ different countries in the latest batch[2]

[1] [http://valleywag.gawker.com/anti-foreigner-vc-also-
supports-...](http://valleywag.gawker.com/anti-foreigner-vc-also-supports-
hiring-discrimination-1215372055)

[2] [http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-12-24/y-combinator-
reache...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-12-24/y-combinator-reaches-
farther-beyond-silicon-valley.html)

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dmk23
Controversy drives page views. That's all you need to know about
Gawker/Valleywag.

Stop worrying about every troll. Just ignoring them is the best revenge.

~~~
amagumori
logically speaking, for "Controversy drives page views" = P and "Just ignoring
them is the best revenge" = Q, in this case P implies not Q. if controversy
drives page views then by definition they're hard to ignore (as long as
they're controversial).

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badman_ting
Yeah, getting kind of sick of residents of the home our two most evil
industries (media and finance) talking shit about SV tech firms. New Yorkers
drove our economy off a cliff but would rather bitch about fucking Google
Glasses. Please.

~~~
brown9-2
This argument blames an entire city of people for what a few do just like TFA
criticizes Valleywag for doing.

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vellum
Some background: Over the past year, Valleywag has been taking shots at Pando
and its editor, Sarah Lacy. Pando decided to return the favor.

[http://valleywag.gawker.com/search?q=pandodaily](http://valleywag.gawker.com/search?q=pandodaily)

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brown9-2
Blaming Biddle for rape or murder threats against Justine Sacco is a big
stretch when he only posted about the tweet. I don't see anyone blaming
buzzfeed for the same thing.

This article makes some good points but lumps them in along with several ad
hominem and other pointless attacks (who his father is does not change the
validity of any of Biddle's points). Farhad Manjoo's critique was much more
fair.

Besides how can anyone read Valleywag and not see how desperate and reaching
most of it's articles are? Why should anyone even take them seriously?

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eqdw
As I was reading this article, I found myself wanting to click the links he
was posting (to get context), but didn't want to give Valleywag my pageviews.

So I wrote a chrome extension that solves this problem.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6969487](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6969487)

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5vforest
Valleywag is the TMZ of Silicon Valley. Remind yourself of that when reading
it, and you'll be fine.

~~~
bmelton
It wasn't something I'd read before, but having it summed up so succinctly
assures me that it is _definitely_ not something I'll be reading any time
soon.

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sologoub
Not sure about the Gawker drama, but $155k for the train operator pay is quite
remarkable. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average train
operator salary in the US is $46k: [http://www.bls.gov/ooh/transportation-and-
material-moving/tr...](http://www.bls.gov/ooh/transportation-and-material-
moving/train-engineers-and-operators.htm)

~~~
jmspring
Look at BART salaries, compare them with SV engineer salaries. There is some
validity to the comparison of playing one working class against another.

Not everyone in Silicon Valley taking the buses is making bank, just like not
everyone protesting is making minimum wage. Part of this is protesting
gentrification, part of it is frustration with a company in regard to ones
situation.

A broader, non tech blog dialog is likely more beneficial than pando vs valley
wag.

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Paul12345534
I actually read the whole thing :) loved every minute. Long long ago I enjoyed
an occasional Valleywag article, can't say I've visited the site now for a few
years.

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potch
I always wonder where people learned the notion that hypocrisy instantly
invalidates any argument in a puff of smug smoke. Yes, Valleywag are pots to
the Silicon Valley kettle. It's still funny, and still shines a good light on
the idiotic self-important traipsing of the tech scene.

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FrankenPC
I agree with they accusations regarding Gawker. I didn't in the past. IMO,
Back when Huffington Post and Gawker were relevant anti-establishment media
outlets, they played a critical role in getting the message out about the
corporate and political madness of the greed-obsessed right wing.
Unfortunately, they both fell to the greed virus and became what they so
vehemently claim they are not.

~~~
pstack
Neither has been anything more than a TMZ clone. Why would anyone in tech read
either one? Especially Gawker. Gawker is about as relevant to technology (or
anything besides the latest celebrity gossip) as People Magazine is.

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jgalt212

      >>> import Levenshtein
      >>> Levenshtein.distance("pando", "pander")
      2

