5 ms·

Inside Nick Denton's phony, hypocritical class war against tech workers

157 points by scilro 13y ago

aaronbrethorst 13y ago
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.
jmduke 13y ago
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.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- zenocon 13y ago
  > incredibly glad that HN auto-kills Valleywag links. +1
- wklauss 13y ago
  > 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 13y ago
    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.
ryguytilidie 13y ago
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.
- gametheoretic 13y ago
  The Vanguard enjoys dividing millions into This Group and That Group. Usefulness > understanding.
- brown9-2 13y ago
  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.
  - usea 13y ago
    It can be both crazy and human nature. I think it's our duty to intercept and correct our harmful natures. The tendency to group and label people -- based on surface-level stuff like where they live or what color is their skin -- qualifies, in my opinion.
  - coldtea 13y ago
    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).
    - 13y ago
dmk23 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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).
- bhartzer 13y ago
  Slander lawsuits drive traffic, too.
wavesounds 13y ago
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.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
throwaway_yy2Di 13y ago
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 13y ago
  Holy shit.
badman_ting 13y ago
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 13y ago
  This argument blames an entire city of people for what a few do just like TFA criticizes Valleywag for doing.
- wklauss 13y ago
  Well, in defense of NYC, it has a lot of industries, not just media and finance. There's advertising, fashion, entertainment, art, food... This makes the city much more diverse than San Francisco, IMHO. 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.
5vforest 13y ago
Valleywag is the TMZ of Silicon Valley. Remind yourself of that when reading it, and you'll be fine.
- bmelton 13y ago
  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.
brown9-2 13y ago
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?
jgalt212 13y ago
>>> import Levenshtein >>> Levenshtein.distance("pando", "pander") 2
FrankenPC 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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.
sologoub 13y ago
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/train-engineers-and-operators.htm http://www.bls.gov/ooh/transportation-and-material-moving/tr...
- jmspring 13y ago
  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.
minimax 13y ago
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.
potch 13y ago
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.
Paul12345534 13y ago
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.
vellum 13y ago
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
eqdw 13y ago
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
newnewnew 13y ago
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-hiring-discrimination-1215372055 http://valleywag.gawker.com/anti-foreigner-vc-also-supports-... [2] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-12-24/y-combinator-reaches-farther-beyond-silicon-valley.html http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-12-24/y-combinator-reache...

157 points by scilro 13y ago

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.

jmduke 13y ago

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.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
zenocon 13y ago
> incredibly glad that HN auto-kills Valleywag links. +1
wklauss 13y ago
> 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 13y ago
  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.

ryguytilidie 13y ago

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.

gametheoretic 13y ago
The Vanguard enjoys dividing millions into This Group and That Group. Usefulness > understanding.
brown9-2 13y ago
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.
- usea 13y ago
  It can be both crazy and human nature. I think it's our duty to intercept and correct our harmful natures. The tendency to group and label people -- based on surface-level stuff like where they live or what color is their skin -- qualifies, in my opinion.
- coldtea 13y ago
  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).
  - 13y ago

dmk23 13y ago

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 13y ago
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).
bhartzer 13y ago
Slander lawsuits drive traffic, too.

wavesounds 13y ago

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.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

throwaway_yy2Di 13y ago

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 13y ago
Holy shit.

badman_ting 13y ago

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 13y ago
This argument blames an entire city of people for what a few do just like TFA criticizes Valleywag for doing.
wklauss 13y ago
Well, in defense of NYC, it has a lot of industries, not just media and finance. There's advertising, fashion, entertainment, art, food... This makes the city much more diverse than San Francisco, IMHO. 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.

5vforest 13y ago

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

bmelton 13y ago
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.

brown9-2 13y ago

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?

jgalt212 13y ago

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

FrankenPC 13y ago

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 13y ago
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.

sologoub 13y ago

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/train-engineers-and-operators.htm http://www.bls.gov/ooh/transportation-and-material-moving/tr...

jmspring 13y ago
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.

minimax 13y ago

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.

potch 13y ago

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.

Paul12345534 13y ago

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.

vellum 13y ago

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

eqdw 13y ago

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

newnewnew 13y ago

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-hiring-discrimination-1215372055 http://valleywag.gawker.com/anti-foreigner-vc-also-supports-... [2] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-12-24/y-combinator-reaches-farther-beyond-silicon-valley.html http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-12-24/y-combinator-reache...