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.
The people at the second-tier mud-slingers that repeat stuff off of Valleywag (Business Insider) are just as culpable.
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).
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.
+1
I think censorship is a terrible idea, even when the censored articles come from places you don't hold in very high esteem.
Stop worrying about every troll. Just ignoring them is the best revenge.
It breaks my heart to say it. I loved San Francisco for many, many years -and lived there briefly-. But every time I go back now I can't help but realize everybody looks the same and have the same interest and goals and take on life. This makes the city much less interesting.
Of course this is a generalization. I'm sure there are fantastic different kinds of people around, but as a casual observer, the valley has become a very homogeneous area.
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.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.
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.
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.
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-...
[2] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-12-24/y-combinator-reache...
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?
So I wrote a chrome extension that solves this problem. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6969487
>>> import Levenshtein
>>> Levenshtein.distance("pando", "pander")
2