Leaving a comment on T/C is like spinning a roulette wheel. It can be really frustrating to have comments censored when they are not incendiary or trollish in any way. What's shocking is that many racist / homophobic / trollish comments are posted regularly. If you agree with Arrington on one of his douchy posts about how the NY Times doesn't understand journalism, you can say whatever you want.
Initially I stopped visiting techcrunch because of the ignnorance and hatred in the comments for a post Arrington made about a T-shirt company that sold intentionally offensive and incendiary products. I revisited a few months later (after I read they reshuffled and hired more reporters). Things were a little better for a while but Arrington seems to have returned to his aggressive and argumentative self. I didn't see discussion of it here but yesterday he went off on the Times and attacked their journalistic integrity for reporting techcrunch's dubious recent history (see last.fm).
Laporte is right, though, Arrington is a troll. He picks fights with anyone he can. "What are you gonna do about it" seems to be his attitude about everything, and when people disagree, he censors their comments from his Bully pulpit. This is no different from what people like O'Reilly and other right wing radio hosts do when they cut the microphone of people they do not agree with.
Oh yes,I am not taking personally. I am just reflecting about it. However, one thing I do not like is people preaching something that they do not do. Michael Arrington is always questioning people's integrity but does not like to be questioned. You cannot have both way. If you are a warrior, then fight, do not hide.
Yes, you are right. I am not going to comment on TechCrunch website anymore, but use FriendFeed or Twitter. FriendFeed is very nice for this, it gives you a nice way to have a discussion on the article based on your comment, and to access all your comments at later stage.
Whats the point of leaving a comment on techcrunch anyways? Noone actually reads them, since they are full of spam(i.e. that ______locator guy - hackernewslocator.com, LOCATE YOUR HACKER NEWS!)
You gotta give him credit tho. As unbelievably annoying as he can be, he's got ppl talking about his yet-to-be-launched startup on other sites and whats more, have his startup's name actually be recognised!
Consequently, event and information need to be excessively exaggerated to get the appropriate attention and emotionally packaged to get the expected assimilation.
I think this is true, but rather depressing. When you excessively (as in: more than is warranted) exaggerate to get attention, you might succeed in the short term but ultimately you just breed cynicism. You also desensitise your readership - think of it as crying wolf. If your emotion (anger, enthusiasm, whatever) is always dialed up to 11, what do you do when something actually important happens?
While the odd rant and rave can be entertaining, I find the cumulative effect rather draining. When a blog goes that way, I just stop reading it. The more emotional noise I find, the more I appreciate quite mature reflection.
Also, to comment on the experiment - that blog post should have been more along the lines of "Arrington is a censoring Nazi" to really investigate whether excessive exaggeration gets more hits. It was really too reasonable to prove the point :-)
most of what I have seen of venturebeat.com and slashdot.org and techmeme.com is the same story repeated everywhere. None of these are much of a blog sites anymore. They are news sites with some blogging.
Initially I stopped visiting techcrunch because of the ignnorance and hatred in the comments for a post Arrington made about a T-shirt company that sold intentionally offensive and incendiary products. I revisited a few months later (after I read they reshuffled and hired more reporters). Things were a little better for a while but Arrington seems to have returned to his aggressive and argumentative self. I didn't see discussion of it here but yesterday he went off on the Times and attacked their journalistic integrity for reporting techcrunch's dubious recent history (see last.fm).
Laporte is right, though, Arrington is a troll. He picks fights with anyone he can. "What are you gonna do about it" seems to be his attitude about everything, and when people disagree, he censors their comments from his Bully pulpit. This is no different from what people like O'Reilly and other right wing radio hosts do when they cut the microphone of people they do not agree with.