I notice that stuff gets upvoted on Hacker News, and within 6 hours, its published on The Verge, Forbes, Techcrunch - you name it. Hacker News and Reddit are now fodder for the tech media.
The fact that the original article wasn't even that original and was poorly written just makes this sad. Perhaps journalists just want to jump on anything that goes viral for no reason.
When Wikipedia was little (when I started in early 2004, we were #500 in the world. I was seriously impressed), and I was just someone who volunteered to answer a UK press enquiry then another one, we were in the technical press a lot.
The trouble with the technical press is that they are whores. Cheap diseased ones. (The press in general arguably is, but the tech press are so blatant.) Previously whores to print advertisers, now whores to ad-banner trolling. So unsubstantiable bullshit is the order of the day, because IT GETS THE CLICKS.
Some of you aren’t whores, but you know damn well you’re few and far between. The rest can fuck off, thanks.
Wikipedia should have ignored the tech press from the start. Anyone not selling something should too. Taking someone seriously just because they pay you attention is not a good idea.
It’s so much nicer dealing with the mainstream press — at least they can spell “journalism.” They can’t work computers, but anything you can’t explain in a difficult-to-corrupt soundbite you can’t explain.
Frightening thought for today: the tech press have figured out how to make money from journalism on the Internet, and this will be the only style of journalism to survive.
