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 n

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.