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Last.fm: "Techcrunch are full of shit"
- gstar 18y agoI'm chuffed that a respectable outfit like last.fm publishes a blog post with a title like that. About time. Techcrunch has been on the inflection point of "mattering" to the wider public, which scares the life out of me!
- j2d2 18y agoIt's not even grammatically correct! "Techcrunch is full of shit" would be right.
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- 3pt14159 18y agoI can't see why you got down voted. That was my first thought when I read it. I reread it 5 or 6 times until I decided that I must be missing something. TechCrunch = a corporation A corporation = a legal person Singular, not plural!
- endtime 18y agoI can't see why you got down voted. Probably because his comment isn't interesting, isn't relevant, and doesn't contribute to discussion. There are all kinds of true but uninteresting comments one can make, but making them shouldn't be encouraged. Edit: I'm sorry if that sounds harsh, but actively discouraging uninteresting comments is what keeps the signal:noise ratio high here.
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- davidw 18y agoExactly. However, once upon a time, this site also had a tradition of not downvoting people all that much for comments that were simply a bit inane or misguided, rather than actively trolling or flaming.
- ramchip 18y agoI'd like to concur on that. I was a bit surprised when I got -4'd for stating that a website ad caused trouble on Opera (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=491583 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=491583). Perhaps I sounded harsh as well, but still, the goal was just to help...
- j2d2 18y agoJust look at how much chatter it created for something not relevant. Perhaps it's off-topic, but it was interesting to hear HN's views on what is and isn't correct.
- jackzombie 18y agoVery true. Proper grammar is important, and this forum is as good as any place to clear up any questions so that mistakes can be avoided in the future.
- scott_s 18y agoThe author is British: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_differences#Formal_and_notional_agreement http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_di...
- chiffonade 18y agoWhich is strange, because the whole concept behind the British invention of the "corporation" is to address a group of people as a singular entity.
- aristus 18y agoNot quite -- the underlying concept is a "company" in the sense of a troupe, band, eg "The King's Men", the "Dorrit's Chalk-Weavers", "Harold & Sons". The idea of a "corporate person" is much more recent, like 1880's, and I think started in the US.
- chiffonade 18y agoNo, you're wrong. The concept of corporate singularity started in the 1600s in England. From wikipedia: In the late seventeenth century, Stewart Kyd, the author of the first treatise on corporate law in English, defined a corporation as, "a collection of many individuals united into one body, under a special denomination, having perpetual succession under an artificial form, and vested, by policy of the law, with the capacity of acting, in several respects, as an individual, particularly of taking and granting property..."
- jacquesm 18y agoactually, it started in Holland with the V.O.C.
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- dunk010 18y agoPerhaps, you know, it might have been intentional......
- dustineichler 18y agoNoticed this too, but I think grammatically he used "are" in the inclusive sense that everyone at techcrunch _is_ full of sh*t. therefore, if you work their... it must be so.
- omouse 18y ago>Techcrunch has been on the inflection point of "mattering" to the wider public, which scares the life out of me! Your pants must be very soiled. Did you know that the wider public reads tabloids as well? Did you know that they read gossip rags? CLEAN UP IN AISLE GSTAR!
- gstar 18y agoHey, I said life - nobody said anything about brown trousers. Thanks for your concern though, and I'll just clean up with this copy of the Mirror.
- gregparadee 18y agoLast.FM FTW, seriously TechCrunch is getting worse and worse every week.
- gstar 18y agoI (obviously) agree. You might see some reticence to post here though, as TC is a bit of a cabal and nobody with a public profile wants to shake the cage.
- jrockway 18y agoI have a public profile, and long ago dismissed TechCrunch as one of the least intelligent blogs on the Internet. The writing is bad, the content is boring, and now we know it's not even correct. Go away, TechCrunch.
- alain94040 18y agoBoring it's not. Frankly, I'm disappointed by this thread. HN's audience is supposedly smarter than your average Internet crowd. But all I'm hearing here is cheap bashing of the target that everyone loves to hate. Can anyone do better and post an intelligent comment that addresses the topic? Again, TechCrunch is not boring. One of its strengths is not so much the "breaking news" aspect, but the tongue-in-cheek or tell-it-like-it-is. In many news organizations, politically correct has removed any spark of interesting content. Not at TechCrunch. It's news with an attitude. You may or may not like the attitude, but at least there's one. [disclaimer: you can accuse me of bias because of my company connections to TC, but it also means that I got to see some of the behind the scenes and I learned a lot doing so]
- tarmac 18y agoThis makes me think about that TechCrunchee getting spit on the face... I'd now like to get the spitter's side of the story.
- jrockway 18y agoI think the idea is that in order for your startup to succeed, you need TechCrunch to like it. The spitter probably got a bad review. (Anyway, I don't think this is important. Very few people with money to spend have ever heard of TechCrunch. Their opinion mostly matters in the VC echo chamber, not in the real world.)
- jm4 18y agoTechCrunch is awful, but there's no excuse for the spit in the face incident. I don't give a damn what lousy, fabricated article TechCrunch might have published to precipitate that. It's disgusting and totally uncalled for.
- vaksel 18y agowho knows if that really happened, or if Arrington was just linkbaiting to make money
- jm4 18y agoI don't know if it really happened. I don't much care, either. But if I remember correctly, the title of the article in question was 'Some Things Need to Change'. That's hardly linkbait. The linkbait accusation is also a little odd coming from someone who submits practically every linkbait TechCrunch article that shows up in the RSS feed.
- unalone 18y agoDon't treat Arrington like some soulless mythical creature. He's a real person. He's susceptible to being offended enough to get pissed off at people and to rant even when he's been in the business for a long time. Can you imagine how low you'd have to be to fake an incident like that just to get a few hits? Arrington has his faults, but he's not a showboater. (Also remember that this article was posted while he's taking a break from TechCrunch entirely. Don't blame him for this story.)
- dimitry 18y agoThat title is nothing new. I'm just glad someone (with a big audience) is saying it publicly.
- uuilly 18y agoDid he mean to say "Techcruch are full of shit" instead of "Techcrunch is full of shit?" Is there an inside joke I'm missing?
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- lacker 18y agoIn British English company names act as plural nouns.
- pg 18y agoI usually do this, and editors always want to change it. I never realized it was an English thing.
- eli 18y agoEither is correct in American English, but it may violate a style guidelines. It generally hinges on whether you consider Techcrunch a group of people or a monolithic entity.
- gstar 18y agoI'm always personifying companies, reading it back, realising Americans won't like it, and then awkwardly trying to rephrase it to avoid the issue.
- StrawberryFrog 18y agoAnd the article considers them to be a bunch...
- electromagnetic 18y agoI have the same problem, I just don't approve of 'style' when it comes to writing. There are lots of personal style and it does amazing, but there are company style guides and printing houses all have different ones. I have a serious problem using '...' in writing unless it's from the person's mouth. I always learnt if someone says something directly to you then use '...' and if it comes indirect you use "..." so all novels should use "..." because it's fiction and was never said. Yet so many printing houses have gone away from using "..." and have switched to using the quotation form '...'. I'm unsure why I get worked up over this, I guess I just think it's stupid so few people have control over how the masses perceive the English language. This is a prime example, in the US most institutions use 'is' in this situation, to such a degree that 'are' looks bizarre and the opposite happened in the UK. The same is with 'ise' and 'ize'. Using 'ize' is so prevalent in the US that in many words the letter S is being supplanted with Z in situations it's not supposed to be. The prime example is how analyse is incorrectly spelled (even in spell checkers) as analyze and I'm sorry but it is technically correct to substitute the suffix 'ise' for 'ize', however analyse is a complete word without suffix, it's not discussing anal.
- axod 18y agoIt'll be interesting to see if TechCrunch acknowledge this, respond or apologize... My bet is they completely ignore it.
- physcab 18y agoIf people didn't like Techcrunch, they wouldn't go to the site. If Techcrunch was irrelevant, they wouldn't generate massive leads for pet projects that people create. There was an article a week or so ago about how people were complaining every time Techcrunch posted a story about some Twitter application. The author of the article wrote back in protest basically saying, "well if you don't like the articles, don't comment on them." Techcrunch generates buzz. They're good at it. I may live in a hole, but I didn't really hear about Last.fm until Techcrunch posted that story. Last.fm got a pageview from me off of that story. And personally, I don't really care about TC's opinion. I'm smart enough to make my own judgment. But until they report it, I have little way discovering new companies.
- sgoraya 18y agoI agree - Although the quality may be slipping, I still find the site useful enough to check it out daily in my news/info gathering routine in the mornings. If something interests me, I'll read the full post (which is becoming rare now days). A while back I had sworn the site off because of link baiting headlines and the fantastically smarmy tone of some of the stories, but hey, there is still an occasion nugget or two.
- giles_bowkett 18y agoIf people didn't like Techcrunch, they wouldn't go to the site. If Techcrunch was irrelevant, they wouldn't generate massive leads for pet projects that people create. these points are both true, but they don't alter the fact that Techcrunch is also full of shit.
- physcab 18y agoIf they are, why do people post TC articles on here every few hours? I typically don't advise people to read articles that are full of shit. I think people who whine about TC articles and think they are full of shit are in the minority. Their fan base seems to be growing rapidly. You can't impress everyone with your writing. And besides, TC is a blog. I think you're entitled to say whatever you want, even if its full of shit.
- jonursenbach 18y agoIt finally happened. Techcrunch is the new Valleywag.
- dunk010 18y agoTrue dat.
- vaksel 18y agoso who is the new techcrunch?
- tonystubblebine 18y agoWe are. Hacker News is the top spot for getting news relevant to startups.
- vaksel 18y agowell we are more of a news aggregating service, need some original content. Need more stories to break on HN
- tonystubblebine 18y agoYou don't have to have the same form as something in order to replace it. I don't think the number of breaking stories has any effect on the quality of HN.
- jacquesm 18y agoIn fact, I think that more 'breaking' stories is going to have a negative effect.
- electromagnetic 18y agoAgreed, more emphasis on 'breaking stories' means that there'll be more fake 'breaking stories'. Look at tabloids, the more news they 'break' the better they sell and now everything is outright lies.
- josefresco 18y agoAnd just like that, there's a whole new audience for TechCrunch that never existed. "Thanks Last.fm for all the free PR" Sincerely, M.A.
- thaumaturgy 18y agoExcept that this Last.FM post is currently the number 3 result in Google for "TechCrunch", with its title prominently displayed. Oops.
- Harkins 18y agoThat's just Google giving prominent placement to something they see as breaking news. It'll disappear in a week or so, then reappear somewhere much lower in a few more weeks as it's normally indexed by their crawler picking up links and rebuilding its graph.
- sgrove 18y agoOverall, not a bad deal for TC, I'd say. Checking on the twitter stream shows that there's a lot of RT of this headline - which will only serve to spread TC's name around. It may be bad in the long run, but they may be able to issue some muted apology, patch things up, and restore their standing. More coverage, etc. Of course, with MA's combative personality, it may go slightly differently, but it's probably a net positive for TC. Sadly enough.
- axod 18y agoYeah I'm guessing most people on twitter already know about TC actually. Heck most of them probably first read about twitter on TC - they post enough 'twitter' stories there.
- tmilewski 18y agoI really want to see what Techcrunch says. While this is terribly unprofessional, Techcruch had it coming to them.
- giles_bowkett 18y agolike most people who post here you need to read Paul Graham's early work. professionalism is harmful to quality of work and especially so in startups. professionalism is an artifact of the industrial revolution and is not relevant in all fields. computer programming is to some degree post-industrial and professionalism is irrelevant and archaic for many programmers. criticizing a programmer for being unprofessional is like criticizing him or her for not being well acquainted with the phases of the moon and the effect those phases have on that programmer's crops.
- ErrantX 18y agorubbish. it is easily possible to be professional and produce excellent work. it doesnt have to be stuffy and haughty that's all :) (and yeh I read his early stuff: not a fan. At every stage in a startup you have to get to a stage where you need to show some professional gloss to prove your not just another backroom programmer - IMO it is the core reason why a lot fail, they cling slavishly to that "fun guy" image and lose corporate custom because of it ;)) @the previous poster: I wouldnt call it unprofessional per se. Empassioned perhaps :D sorry for the OT :)
- giles_bowkett 18y agothere you have it in a nutshell
- ErrantX 18y agoThe most disappointing thing is that the TC writer is clinging to his story. After a complete denial he is still trying to suggest there is some truth in the rumor. Either produce the hard evidence or apologise.
- chops 18y agoLink?
- ErrantX 18y agoErr the TC article... "Despite my attempts to corroborate it and the subsequent detail I’ve been able to gather, I still don’t have enough information to determine whether it is absolutely true. But I still don’t have enough information to determine that it is absolutely false either." Is his last word on the matter. Essentially he is saying they have denied it but his "rumor" may even still be true. That smacks of a lie somewhere along the line to me (and as it is my job to find lies I suspect it is the case). :) http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/02/20/did-lastfm-just-hand-over-user-listening-data-to-the-riaa/#comment-2632012 http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/02/20/did-lastfm-just-hand-ov...
- pramit 18y agoTechcrunch tried but couldn't become the Red Herring of web 2.0. Nowhere near.
- peregrine 18y agoWhy does this story have such a longer Front Page Life?