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

God bless our free unencumbered press

kind of agree wit this

'@ggreenwald

Gawker is like @RyanLochte

It's hard to separate the Medals from the vandalism and public urinating.

― a (waterface), Friday, August 19, 2016 9:03 AM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah, hard for some to separate The Glenn Greenwald of the last 10 years from the lawyer who defended murderous neo-nazis pro bono.

tom, do you read ars technica regularly? if you don't, i think you would like it a lot.

I read ars technica daily, it looks kind of terrible on a phone though. Also, it is insufficient.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CqPD9a4W8AQAKqE.jpg

Gawker, and its seven sister sites, had been so successful that we were even looking beyond the blog and into the future with a project Nick had dubbed Kinja. Practically, Kinja was just the proprietary publishing software and commenting system that had been introduced on the blogs in early 2013. But Nick had Facebook-size aspirations for it. In the future, it would be a public platform, designed to give anyone the ability to publish useful information — gossip, news, context — in an infinitely modular format: a stand-alone piece of writing that might also be a comment on another stand-alone post or embedded in a third. Over emails, Nick imagined “at least a decade” of building Kinja — at the end of which, if done right, “we’ll be the ones doing the acquiring.”

"I am the one who gawks"

http://i.ytimg.com/vi/wMEq1mGpP5A/0.jpg

RIP, the Kinja died before it could become good-ass

http://nymag.com/selectall/2016/08/did-i-kill-gawker.html

anyway a good read from our guy on the inside

Only nine words of Jessie are in the voice of the dog; everything after the intro is the dude yarling at Jessie to leave him alone.

Wait, ten words.

commented at max, but is it just me, or do people keep confusing the article on the conde naste dude who was looking for a paid hookup when he was traveling and the really softball "peter thiel, a smart, successful man, is gay" article? i've seen at least a few mentions of how "cruel" the thiel thing was and none of them make any sense unless they're misremembering what article they read

admittedly i haven't been following this *that* closely but i didn't know the context/tone of the original thiel article until i just read max's article so it's possible that a lot of people (who likewise hadn't read the original article) are just thinking it was a cruel/snarky outing rather than conflating the two articles. (of course some may be conflating too.)

Is Gizmodo Nights anything like Baywatch Nights?

lol you can read it, it's still there: http://gawker.com/335894/peter-thiel-is-totally-gay-people

xps that was a good "read". the only really-bad-and-ew thing that gawker did imo is the 2015 outing. after that happened i blanket-hated the site in maybe a similar way that it hated "c-list execs" as a class of people or w/e.

in these late times I still hold strong to my belief that the clowning of some of the dumbest silicon valley ideas what PT really gets angry about

libertarian island would exist if it weren't for these meddling journalists!

is there any doubt about that? these parasites and their gibes, little men hiding behind the "freedom" of the "press" to mock the great ones who alone can carry us forward, pessimists whose very snarkiness because of its hold over small minds poses an existential threat to worthy men's transcendence, makers, takers, who is peter thiel, u guys i'm totally gonna be immortal, etc

read max's piece and was side-eyeing certain aspects of it, but this bit of honesty struck me:

I could construct (and, during the past year, often have, over sheepish drinks with disappointed or angry colleagues) an elaborate house of rationalization, wings upon wings of explanation about the value of transparency, the democratic significance of holding nothing back. But ultimately we’d put to work a tactic best used to shame homophobic politicians against a guy whose only real crime was being a member of our abstract notion of the enemy class. We hadn’t exposed any great hypocrisy; instead, we’d taken a bit of gossip and brought the full bludgeoning of moral urgency and ideological commitments to bear on it.

the thiel story, by comparison, wasn't remotely combative, and if thats really what had thiel so mad for all this time, jeeeeeesus christ

they're not posting anymore, are they? :(

The Thiel article says "Here are all the reasons why it would make a VC's life difficult to be out. We're going to out Peter Thiel". Literally the only reason you can't imagine it enraging him is if you haven't read it.

yeah i'm not gay so my grasp of the politics of outing is extremely poor, but I can't help feeling like outing someone is a shitty thing to do no matter how much of an asshole they are.

outing someone's sexuality, when they don't want it public, is bad

when the people in what you're claiming as your community (SV) know your sexual orientation and they claim a certain set of social values and you're representing yourself in a completely different way and actively giving money to efforts that subvert those values it kind of behooves your peers to erase that line

xp Well that's the thing, they're not saying he's an asshole! The article is entirely in favour of him while pointing out what a shitty thing they're doing to him - *shrug* that's Gawker I suppose.

if you connect the dots on peter thiel, he started a conservative publication in college shortly after (and some say in reaction to) people yelling about "f*ggots" in the courtyard near dorms who got in trouble.

to be fair that's right in line with the SV "free speech" ethos of thinking people shouting abuse should be as protected as people speaking politely

outing someone's sexuality, when they don't want it public, is bad

Would you have made an exception for Roy Cohn?

it comes down to the "people should be allowed to say whatever they want, as often as they want, even if it's abusive because that's still speech" position that twitter finally stepped away from by rolling out abuse mitigation tools to everyone (but not until yesterday!) https://blog.twitter.com/2016/new-ways-to-control-your-experience-on-twitter

then you have the "we can't out anyone, anywhere, ever, because that violates the social norms weapply to everyone" side

I think there's a line and it's somewhere in the middle and the conde nast dude article crossed my personal line

Morbs I sure as hell would

on the other hand, I could probably be convinced that since it's not my community, it's not my business

I've seen the argument that Roy Cohn, Peter Thiel and others who have pursued actions that could harm gay people who aren't well-to-do, closeted conservative types were presenting (or not presenting) their sexuality in a way that should be the standard. The same people tend to have ideas about proper roles for women and people of color.

my take on outing is that it's hard to base judgment on "what actually happens" or "who the person is" since those things are really hard to generalize about or know. in general i think it's bad because of the presumption that you're going to make that choice for someone.

Morbs's point of Roy Cohn is relevant because that guy was making the choice for other people all the damn time!

Cohn and McCarthy targeted many government officials and cultural figures not only for suspected Communist sympathies, but also for alleged homosexuality. McCarthy and Cohn were responsible for the firing of scores of gay men from government employment, and strong-armed many opponents into silence using rumors of their homosexuality

Thiel funneling cash to anti-gay marriage initiatives, maybe not on the same scale? I don't know

i'm sure this is wildly off-base but thiel reminds me a bit of closet types i've known who seem to like hiding in plain sight because it allows them to fulfill more of their ambitions and there is definitely an understandable urge to bring them down to earth and back to the realities of sexual politics because of it. for one because they are very much lacking in empathy for anyone who looks different than the ideal they've built around themselves.

I believe the catchphrase for that mindset is "got mine, fuck you"

http://gawker.com/the-only-thing-that-would-make-us-feel-better-is-if-you-1785515822

parting shots fired

haha damn

max's article doesn't finger the real culprit that killed gawker which obv was ilx.

the thing is, it really was just thiel who killed gawker. like all these other things made everything harder and worse and pushed people out of its corner. but it wasn't the other stuff that made them lose the case, and the case was the binary option on which everything hinged.

Yup

do we know if gawker dot com was itself profitable (or was it the vanity project bankrolled by gizmodo & co by the end), modulo hogan? I feel like the answer is yes and univision just don't want the present value of all future lawsuits

my sense, based on absolutely nothing, is that it was profitable but in a *really* small peanuts way within the current media landscape

Sounds about right

pretty sure daulerio killed gawker?

good-ass kinja failed to save gawker

need a gawkeresque investigation into why denton so loved the name 'kinja'

wondered if it meant 'golden future' in some obscure language but it seems it might actually mean 'feces' in malay

what seems to be missing from most of this stuff is why terry bollea's -- let alone hulk hogan's -- violated privacy is worth $140m when (i'm told) wrongful death payouts average like $3.5m. florida courts, i guess?

juries, man

uh those people weren't famous wrestlers and they didn't have to live with any indignity. only die with it, obv

i wonder if kinja was named kinja because it was a five-letter domain name that was available for relatively cheap in 2004. sites have been given names for stupider reasons.

i think it was named kinja as a reference to the popular slang "good-ass kinja"

it's an anagram of jknia, short for jkniajkflejjdsnsmsjjick, which is an expressionistic way to convey frustration by mashing a bunch ok keys

given the chance gawker will always report on married c-suite executives of major media companies fucking around on their wives

— max read (@max_read) July 17, 2015

RIP

ugh yes i thought max's obit was decent but for fuck's sake stop saying 'c-suite'