hey gawker dudes. what the fuck is wrong with you?

shipping the news xp

xp since we were talking about whether or not it would be feasible for nick denton to just fire all of gawker & replace with 19 year olds, i assumed it was understood when we were talking about "good" or "bad" writing that it was, like, writing that differentiates itself positively for readers in some way and is therefore "scarce" in a way generic 19 year old's blogpost isn't. not literally your subjective favourite writers. i'm sorry the person who wrote a restaurant review that you liked got fired, i don't think gawker corp is weighing whether or not you and a guy who posts on a moribund indie rock messageboard as "balls" likes his writers or not in this hypothetical financial eval

U sure get hardson for gawker

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2EwViQxSJJQ

xp since we were talking about whether or not it would be feasible for nick denton to just fire all of gawker & replace with 19 year olds, i assumed it was understood when we were talking about "good" or "bad" writing that it was, like, writing that differentiates itself positively for readers in some way and is therefore "scarce" in a way generic 19 year old's blogpost isn't.

perhaps most telling is that Gawker thinks that even the people who were producing original content vs reposting links (forgot Adam Weinstein) were completely replaceable or irrelevant to their business model. If writers with some clue about their fields of interest who can churn out a few thousand original words per day are cogs, what must management think of the guy who writes 1.5 paragraphs linking to an announcement that Bobby Jindal is dropping out?

i don't get the condescension towards aggregation, either. the internet is all about aggregation. do y'all fancy yourselves as like, some lone raw dog internet explorers, out there surfing the big bad world wide web alone? "nah man, i don't fuck with content aggregators. i go for the straight dope myself." *refreshes imgur front page for the 1000th time today* do you actually want to read reddit? isn't it good that someone holds their noses, goes in there, finds some funny stuff to show you, and writes a sarcastic paragraph below it?

aggregation is fine, it's just a little weird that what's essentially a cool-kids-club Reader's Digest has become this huge widely-read thing. yr right though the attitude toward aggregation is really hostile, I always attribute my own "eh, who cares" attitude about it to being old tho. feel like if I were 20 I'd wanna be digging shit up myself, not having people frame it for me

I don't have a problem with aggregation (seems pretty obvious that I visit Jalopnik and Deadspin daily if nothing else) but I'm not going to pretend that the ability to copy and past a link comprises a unique and valuable skill set.

JCLC yr tumblr is like my fav content aggregator, u aggregate good content like swords, websites, pictures of rad dudes, pictures of rad demons

xp-

then why do you go to jalopnik or deadspin and not somewhere else to get your aggregated cars and uh, (deadspin is sports right?) content? do you even read the text that accompanies the link if they are so poorly written in your opinion?

or i mean, going with what jordan said, why not read upworthy instead of gawker, if all both sites do is paste links?

I don't have a problem with aggregation (seems pretty obvious that I visit Jalopnik and Deadspin daily if nothing else) but I'm not going to pretend that the ability to copy and past a link comprises a unique and valuable skill set.

― Kiarostami bag (milo z), Tuesday, November 17, 2015 9:07 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

this isn't a job that exists. people who do this are replaced by people who are better. even people whose jobs are to purely aggregate usually have some sort of skill that may be unseen to the reader -- clean copy, work ethic, ability to churn out posts quickly, ability to show up to work on time etc

no site you read wants to aggregate. if websites could exist without aggregation than they would. but they can't. so they aggregate.

aggregation is fine, it's just a little weird that what's essentially a cool-kids-club Reader's Digest has become this huge widely-read thing.

― tremendous crime wave and killing wave (Joan Crawford Loves Chachi), Tuesday, November 17, 2015 8:58 PM (14 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this isn't wrong. from an old New Yorker profile of Gawker

What [Gawker] is selling, essentially, is a pose of knowing, cool detachment. Very little of what Denton publishes qualifies as gossip in the traditional sense. It’s a sensibility.

the ability to write well in a knowing, cool detached voice is (apparently, otherwise gawker writers would be paid min wage) scarce

there is a middle ground between 'anyone could do that job' and 'only a highly select group of people could do that job'. most middle class people in 2015 have jobs in that middle ground I think.

I don't think online writers at companies that have a 50% chance of not existing in 10 years are great fits for unions regardless.

was anyone from deadspin fired? it is kinda funny who gets poached. like caity weaver? totally get it, super funny. who knows what her shelf life is but whatever. drew magary? definitely has an audience, and if you can't afford bill simmons (and you almost definitely can't) this'll do. but hudson hongro? i was amazed to find out the dodo (ugh) bothered to poach him. like what's the point? nobody there could figure out just go to youtube and search "cute" and "bear" or "funny" and "bear"?

also i don't need an aggregator, i have my facebook friends

gross

jk ;-)

and ilx of course

What [Gawker] is selling, essentially, is a pose of knowing, cool detachment. Very little of what Denton publishes qualifies as gossip in the traditional sense. It’s a sensibility. - The New Yorker on Gawker

[It] has always dealt with experience not by trying to understand it but by prescribing the attitude to be adopted to it. - Robert Warshow on The New Yorker, 1947

haha, bawse

also i don't need an aggregator, i have my facebook friends

this is true and might be why they've decided to become more of a normal political publication

then why do you go to jalopnik or deadspin and not somewhere else to get your aggregated cars and uh, (deadspin is sports right?) content? do you even read the text that accompanies the link if they are so poorly written in your opinion?

The point - yet again - is not that this is bad or that the writers are bad people (put writers in scare quotes if you wish), just that Denton could easily wipe the entire slate clean with only 2-3 players sticking around and absolutely no one would notice. Even those 2-3 players could be swapped out with someone doing a similar thing. Gawker's readership didn't even blink when the top staff walked out.

aside but it kinda blows my mind how quickly john oliver became as useless as jon stewart

also i don't need an aggregator, i have my facebook friends

the shit your facebook friends share is why aggregation exists

the shit my facebook friends share ends up on gawker a few days later generally!

precisely

it's funny cuz when grantland was shut down goon was there to point out that yeah yeah jonathan abrams and zach lowe and wesley morris and whoever but let's not pretend that much (maybe most?) of what grantland was was dumb internet writing like what game of thrones character this or that nba player was or rembert doing some phoned in millenial voice bit or pretty much any non-wesley morris pop culture writing. but that kind of garbage is held up as the great kinja you can only get from gawker. friend three college students and you'll get all you can handle of that pretty quick.

lol yr model has been made redundant by social media

'precisely'

finding things shared on social media by the friends of message board poster balls and then putting them somewhere they can be read by hundreds of thousands of more people is a skill people will pay you real money for

need balls to post that friend list

lol the other day i hit something in the facebook app that brought up things that post a ton in my feed i guess so i could show fewer posts or prioritize, idk i didn't spend long on it before closing the app, but what was funny was like it was generally stuff you'd expect - the ny times, clickhole, nancy grace, v-103 the people's station, russell westbrook, whatever. pages, friends mixed in their too. whatever's feeding the feed. and it had them sorted by like how many things it had spit into the feed that day i guess. and ned was third, like over the ny times and the guardian, w/ 100 posts. this was at like noon!

for real though: like various national parks pages. good stuff.

I had to look up this "Russell Westbrook" person. Apparently he bounces a ball or something.

ned's a beast, it's true

russell westbrook is kinda an interesting, uh, parable (fuck - writing is hard?!!!) into how social media has...disrupted traditional media. that dude doesn't have any time for the media really, deals w/ them as little as possible, and ten years ago or earlier would've just been tagged a jerk by the media and that's all the fans would know and that's that but follow him on twitter and dude is hilarious and charismatic and well dressed and just an obv likable guy. like i'm not even a fan of the thunder and there are aspects of his game i can find problematic if nonetheless extremely entertaining but i'm a big fan of the dude and his social media presence has played a part in that.

i love how this thread has turned into like one or two ppl being like "ugh why would you read something that just copies and pastes other stuff" and then a bunch of ppl explaining the way in which Gakwer aggregates and then subsequently comments on the content that it aggreates and then the same one or two ppl are just like "ugh why would you read something that just copies and pastes other stuff" again

y'all are wack

get caity back and send her to more restaurants w/ rich

send Rich to Disney World every weekend imo

xp - who's saying "why would you read Gawker"? The quality/skill/value of Gawker writing and staffing is a separate question from why use the service.

fwiw i've had deadspin open in another tab this whole time apparently

otm re: Caity & Rich, with the dining and Disney

how quickly the world has neglected "good-ass kinja"

All I want gawker to know is that every time I've visited their site in the last three years I had my ad blocker on

suck it

relevant? http://www.theawl.com/2015/05/dead-sites-posting

also lol for all denton's focus on "brands" and "brand extension" how has gawker tech done such a disasterous job managing branding across subsite verticals for-like-ever?

the subsites never linked to their capsule mission statements, and they lacked good ways to navigate back into the main sites, or even recognize their connection to the appropriate parent sites, and there was no good way to get an overview of "the gawker universe of edited sites".

the lack of desire to really sort out these basic elements of user experience speaks to some sort of just _laziness_ about core direction from management.

like before big shake-ups of people etc maybe they could just have tried to actually let people figure out how to read the damn site more easily?

why are your subsites not getting readers? idk, can people even find them?

otm, the "sub-sites" always seemed like the strangest afterthoughts w/ no actual site behind it, just like some vague label, and there were a million of them

It was only recently I realised that things like Jez and io9 had anything to *do* with Gawker, I just assumed they all used some blog software.

lol the other day i hit something in the facebook app that brought up things that post a ton in my feed i guess so i could show fewer posts or prioritize, idk i didn't spend long on it before closing the app, but what was funny was like it was generally stuff you'd expect - the ny times, clickhole, nancy grace, v-103 the people's station, russell westbrook, whatever. pages, friends mixed in their too. whatever's feeding the feed. and it had them sorted by like how many things it had spit into the feed that day i guess. and ned was third, like over the ny times and the guardian, w/ 100 posts. this was at like noon!

That sounds about right.

Ned, you're one of the few people I know who spends more time actively trawling a more broad array of information (Internet/ music/ otherwise) than I do.

Tbh ilxor is my most generally reliable aggregator and where I get the majority of my breaking news