Tech, Crunched: How the go-to site for startup news lost its way(keepgoingpod.com) |
Tech, Crunched: How the go-to site for startup news lost its way(keepgoingpod.com) |
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 Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google, Meta. But I don't want to read their PR releases. I want someone to do some filtering on that, because there's too much filler there for me to review it daily.
This seems to be a really hard thing to do right! There's a balance in the reporting that it takes a lot of intelligence and finesse to do right, which is why it seems media co's can't do it forever.
One issue is that it can be too adversarial and too clickbait-y. That is a problem.
But the other issue - and this is the problem afflicting the solutions that I've seen - is the opposite. Too far in the pocket of the companies it's reporting on, and friendly to the point of sleepiness, like sitting in on all-hands you're not being paid to attend. A news site that might as well be called "our venture fund and why the companies we invest in are awesome" isn't it.
I don't think there's a site filling this void right now. TC did a decent job at it, for a while, but there should be a new contender.
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 early/free access.
But the vibe there is more WSJ and less buzzfeed
I think the economics of it are such that it's a premium product and not as accessible as TC, which is why I didn't think of it. But in every other respect, it fits.
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 that while the screaming hordes outside yell “paywall?! Paywall?!” But it’s not going to be free like TechCrunch.
Not only TC collapsed but the whole blogosphere collapsed. The independent journalism has collapsed.
When Google and others take your content, crawl your site, store your data, use it and resuse it to serve targeted ads on memes, the journalism becomes a useless pursuit without salary. Google destroyed the internet.
It's a tragedy for whole society.
> Techcrunch is still the leader for stories like "Company A has raised $B million to do C" which my friends and I are very interested in when we are interested in C.
I guess. On the other hand that's the sort of inside baseball news most people I know have zero interest in.
The author seems nostalgic for the good old days, when TechCrunch was a real news outlet that spoke truth to power, and so on. I guess I only ever remember it as a blog that was close enough to Silicon Valley to act as a hype lever, multiplying the force of hype for the latest Silicon Valley horseshit by broadcasting it to the world. The article confirms that was at least part of what they did, but I guess he believes they also did some good things. I wasn't ever a regular reader, and may have that wrong.
I was told back then that this is a function of their readership which is not really interested in startups and is more interested in FAANG or whatever you call it these days.
I post quite a few "Company A has raised $B million to do C" articles to HN and I find that, despite HN being about startups, not a lot of people care if they haven't heard of company A before. It puzzles me a lot because if you are interested in starting a startup or working for a startup or selling things to a startup this is the foundation for your business intelligence.
Having your brand linked to (or even just mentioned) on sites like TC is also something seo spammers swear by too.
After all this proletarization of knowledge workers is normalized, hopefully the new AI Robber Barons will leave us some sick public libraries or some equivalent, at least.
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.
> After years of corporate ownership, culminating in Yahoo’s sale to private equity firm Apollo, TC has become a milquetoast site focused on big raises specially placed by expensive PR people and random tech news that has been neutered into pablum. The current editorial structure, controlled by one or two old-guard TCers and a lot of older editors hired by editor Connie Loizos.
sad to realize that this is exactly what i was feeling about TC in the last 3-4 years. is it salvageable?
This wasn't a legend. Arrington talked or wrote about it, I can't remember where. Maybe in one of his essays explaining why he was going to Hawaii to take a months-long break. He said he was at a conference and someone came up to him and spit in his face, and then walked away without saying a word. As I recall, he regarded the incident as a turning point that prompted soul-searching about what he was doing.
Traffic was paramount and ad sales were vital, so niche startup posts, posts that everyone once read but were now read by the company, lost their value. Over time, the value of a traditional TC story waned.
Nearly every newsroom has struggled with this for more than 15 years. The only media orgs that have been able to escape or partially escape the black hole of clickbait are by massive scale/subscriber counts (NYT, FT) or those funded by sales at some other profitable branch of the company, such as Bloomberg (terminals).
He had the habits of pulling stunts like showing up at meetings he wasn't invited to. And the ways of a savant lawyer at extracting information from people. I've always suspected he knew well in advance about the iPad; and he convinced investors to back him up to produce an equivalent product, partnering with a laptop company. The product got shipped, only just at 8-10 times the weight of the iPad though.
He'd have made a fantastic COO, or investor relationship manager IMHO if he had not chosen to do TechCrunch. I hope he's doing well at his cryptofund.
> So, by all measures, Alexandr Wang’s MEI bullshit was just that, bullshit
Amazing, I don't think he gets it. His rant about white dudes while the person being critiqued is an Asian dude. You don't have to think hard about why Asian people might value merit in a system that previously penalized them for their race?
> Haje argued that Wang was a wang.
Comments like this really highlight the hypocrisy and lack of actual principle behind the stances of these people.
Now it’s far more corporate.
I probably shouldn’t have ranked as high as I did on my Joe Blow blog with better directions to my local passport office or phone numbers for my bank (because the bank’s website sucks and does anything but give you their phone number). But I could often make 1st, 2nd or 3rd result until I didn’t. My content was objectively more useful.
For a while, every Google update that people complained about just bumped me higher. Oh well.
There is something additional at play with TechCrunch, though. Recently I feel like they haven't been posting as many articles that are about smaller startups as they used to. They tend to post more about Google, Nvidia, Intel, etc. I find myself reading it less and less because it's mostly news that you can also find elsewhere.
And hopefully with it, the word "blogosphere".
In his world because it's "white" it's punching-up/innocuous.
As time passes like in everything we tend to forget the bad things and imagine the past with rose colored glasses when the borrowing rates were essentially zero.
But then you interact with one of "those key people" from that era, and dear Lord.. your soul exits the chat.
Btw, Tech Crunch is and always was almost from the start a cesspool of snakeoil salesmen with zero scruples and a shitty pseudo PR firm. Everybody knew this and "everybody" with VC money played the game.
There are many companies like that in the valley too. They just don’t get the attention they deserve.
That’s one of the reasons I miss Steve Jobs. He delivered so much value but could also play the attention game so well.
https://web.archive.org/web/20240628212036/https://techcrunc...
The Pulitzer Prize-worthy content in question:
> I would invite him — and those supporting them — to fuck all the way off. You misunderstand me. You thought I wanted you to fuck only partially the way off. Please, read my lips. I was perfectly clear: Off you fuck. All the way. Remove head from ignorant ass, then fuck all the way off.
This is the quality of writing whose loss the author is arguing is why TechCrunch has lost its global relevance. A perfect inversion of the truth if I've ever seen one.
I tried to pitch a few other stories to their writers with no success.
My favorite writer of theirs from back in the day was Kim-Mai Cutler, I spoke with her once and got the feeling she would have been very receptive to a good pitch if I had it but at that time I didn't. It's no wonder she ran off to be a VC because she developed great industry connections doing what she was doing.
When you have the absolutely astonishing insight into how to create and dominate markets like he had, and the numerous strokes of luck, not to mention the engineering mind of Wozniak to bring your insane ideas to life, you can get away with it. If you have anything short of that, running the Jobs playbook will get you nowhere, and rightfully so.
Edit: And that's not even touching his personal life, which was absolute trash fire.
This was one of my big takeaways reading through folklore.org: "oh man, I would have hated working for that prick"