This sure explains a lot.
urban-bike-cryptid-deactivated2:
This sure explains a lot.
Is there anyone who has more details on this? I guess I’m out of touch because I’m not understanding the context of the tweets above.
I know very little insider stuff but Elon just bought Twitter and announced he’s going to start charging for blue checks. Journalists love their blue checks so I assume this is a tech vs journalism beef
Ok, so there are two things going on these tweets (you should really click through and read both mattyg’s thread and Kelsey’s response, they’re both good).
The first is the abrupt turn that happened in the mainstream press– but especially the New York Times, in the middle of the 2010s– towards very hostile coverage of all things tech. This was really frustrating, because while prior to that the coverage of tech was definitely too adulatory and a correction was needed, this has been way outside the bounds of good journalistic ethics for a while now. And I was on their side for a long time. I held out for a while, and continued to insist it wasn’t that bad, until that one week in 2020 when the NYT shat the bed like five times in the space of two weeks, with the piece on Scott, the thing with Taylor Lorenz and Marc Andreessen’s comments in Clubhouse (and I fucking hate that guy! do you know how bad you have to screw up to make me defend Marc Andreessen?!) and several more incidents in rapid succession.
And for a while I felt like I was going insane, because I couldn’t tell if this was all in my head or maybe it was all in the public interest and I had a biased opinion because of my job. But now Kelsey has confirmed that, no, there was an order from on high to do it this way, facts be damned. (A bunch of people in her replies are completely missing the point, accusing her of thinking “investigative reporting is bad’” No! Invesigative reporting is fine and necessary. Deciding in advance what the tone of a story will be, before you have any facts, and also banning ipso facto any kind of positive coverage, is not. That’s absurd.)
(If you’ve been reading my posts long enough that this attitude comes as a surprise, I should state that I am retracting this post. I believed it at the time, and then the situation just kept getting more and more ridiculous, and now we know why.)
The second bit is, as Matt says, that because a lot of leading figures in tech have gotten so annoyed at their treatment in the press recently, they’ve conjured up this theory about how journalists attach tons of status and self-worth to their blue check marks. And Matt is saying, no, this really isn’t true at all: the fact that journalists all get blue checks by default is more of an implementation quirk of Twitter and nobody really cares. I have no reason to doubt him on this. So what’s sort of funny is that apparently Elon got caught up in the same hatejerk as the rest of tech, and thought that “bluechecks” really did put tons of value on their verified status and could be extorted out of money for it. Which is probably a mistake, and one that’s going to cost him literally billions.
tl;dr we live in the stupid timeline, tech “thought leaders” and the journalists covering them are all awful
