NolanTech journalists on Mastodon: "Mastodon Inc only has 50,000 users, but with adequate venture capital funding it may stand a chance"
More tech journalism on Mastodon: "Mastodon is currently a free service, but soon it will bend to the iron will of Silicon Valley, which is that you either sell out to investors or become irrelevant like Wikipedia."
Still more tech journalism on Mastodon: "Mastodon cannot survive with such a silly name. It needs a more serious and business-friendly name, such as Google, Yahoo, or Hulu."
It's almost as if tech journalists do the bare minimum of research before moving on to the next topic. Or that the tech industry has become so focused on chasing giant piles of money that nobody can remember a time when true successes on the internet were achieved by hobbyists working on passion projects with no regard for how much money they might make
Ꮢ๐ϲoᴄo Ⅿoԁｅm Ᏼaｓіliｓk@nolan
I'm suggesting more of a systemic issue.
When people I *know* are intelligent, careful, deep thinkers whose opinions I respect nevertheless write bad, shallow articles, I can't blame the authors and have to blame capitalism. (Or the structure of the industry or whatever.)
Klint Finley@enkiv2 @sonya @nolan Even with relatively long deadlines and high word counts, there's always going to be stuff that gets left out or glossed over. Sarah Jeong's Mastodon piece was over 3,000 words and there were still lots of things that she didn't cover. Seems like she got a lot of grief for that.
@nolan @sonya @enkiv2 Actually, looking through the stories I can find on Mastodon, I can't find *any* that say it's going to fail because it doesn't have VC, or even any that give Masto's lack of VC funding more than a passing mention.
www.theverge.com/2017/4/4/15177856/mastodon-social-network-twitter-clone
mashable.com/2017/04/04/mastodon-twitter-social-network/
www.wired.com/2017/04/like-twitter-hate-trolls-try-mastodon/
...
Sonya Mann ✅@sonya @enkiv2 @nolan qz.com/951078/the-complete-guide-to-using-mastodon-the-twitter-twtr-alternative/
www.networkworld.com/article/3188766/open-source-tools/mastodonthe-free-software-decentralized-twitter-competitor.html
www.dailydot.com/debug/mastodon-open-source-social-media/
www.digitaljournal.com/tech-and-science/technology/mastodon-is-an-open-alternative-to-twitter/article/490546
@enkiv2 @sonya @nolan re: "tech & business are mostly unrelated." I don't even know how to respond to that. You think that technology isn't a major part of basically every business around today? Or that business considerations don't shape everything from hardware manufacture to user interface design?
There's a circumstantial alignment of concerns. But tech is about as related to business as cooking is: both can be vital to businesses on both a minor and industrial scale (and more people eat than use computers), & certain segments are more integrated than others.
But restaurant reviews don't focus on catering & cookbooks don't focus on fast food, because the focus is on the end user in the normal case.
@sonya @nolan @enkiv2 A few inter-related things play into that, I think. For one, the biz side does matter more in tech than in, say, film. Who you get funding from will shape your company more than who you get funding from will shape your film. For another, a surprisingly large number of people are interested in reading insider basebally articles on the tech industry.
@enkiv2 @nolan @sonya That's led to the growth of sites like TechCrunch, which are essentially trade pubs but have a crossover audience of mainstream readers. So there ends up being a context collapse. A lot of tech coverage is the tech equivalent of the business briefs section of something like Oil and Gas magazine, but on the web, a link is a link. There's no difference between a business brief in a trade pub and a long read from something like the New Yorker.
& it's strange, since tech is more like cooking (i.e., most people who code aren't professionals even if most code is written by pros, there's a long shallow climb in difficulty/exclusivity between amateur & professional, & the industry has many varied important organizations instead of a few very similar ones).
Seeing Wired cover Zuckerberg feels like seeing the CEO of McDonalds on the cover of a cookbook.
What makes it stranger is that in the 70s & 80s there *was* a trade/hobbyist division in tech mags, even though the industry was much more movie-like in the 70s (with micros being the indie scene but the real players being the seven dwarves, and with even playing with micros being a big investment)
@enkiv2 @sonya @nolan Don't get me wrong, lots of stuff in tech gets built just for fun, and a lot of that stuff ends up reshaping basically everything else (Homebrew Computer Club, Linux, the web, Hadoop, Node.js, and with any luck, Mastodon, just to name a few things). But the stuff people use on a day to day basis? Deeply shaped by business.
Laura Bergells ☮️1. In the 1990's, I would also get press releases directly from MS and Apple. I also got the WSJ. Mossberg's columns and big tech co press releases were almost identical.
2. A few years ago, MS came out with Sway. About 100 posts in tech journals had headlines "It's a PowerPoint killer!"
I played with the software for 15 minutes. It was immediately clear that it was not a PowerPoint killer, but a PowerPoint companion.
And we never heard about Sway again.
Mitaj🇵🇱⭐️ 📸 ✅@nolan Jurnalism generally became a news, political, economic, technological and ideological lobby machine. It's not anymore about writing level or professional approach.
Tobias@nolan It's almost like journalism these days is fucking aids. Also, water is wet, more news at 11.
Juha Ruhkala@nolan I get an picture that those journalists have never heard what github is or about this thing called open source
MMN-o ✅⃠@nolan You're forgetting that "tech journalism" is more like "product reports with advertisement alongside". It has basically nothing to do with journalism - even less so any kind of investigative such.
@mmn @nolan
Is this really accurate?
I mean, yeah, there's a subset of tech journalism that's basically product placement/reviews, & thus isn't any better than video game or movie reviews in terms of encouraging content. But very little interesting tech comes out of businesses, so there's at least some non-payola-driven stuff going on.
Even big orgs like ars technica & wired have a huge quality range -- you can tell by word count which articles are fluff.
CJ Mallard@nolan I keep tech journalism in the same bin as gaming journalism: the garbage bin.
Wifi-cable@nolan Many journalists are payed per article they write, instead of being actually employed. Since news agencies often do not pay well for the articles they do take, writing quick and dirty pays off for the journalist.
Strypey@Wifi_cable can confirm. The #MediaWatch show on #RadioNZ reported last year that the number of fulltime PR flacks employed in #Aotearoa is significantly higher than the number of fulltime journalists.
@nolan
@nolan
@Wifi_cable sorry for necroposting ;) I was responding to an old reply to Nolan where you said:
> Many journalists are payed per article they write, instead of being actually employed.
Ferdi F. Zebua 🌏@nolan Um, try Pineapple maybe..? 😅✌
/ducks
connor@nolan Why are they called toots and not tweets, that's different and therefore bad
Antoine Aflalo@nolan /sarcasm
Like Twitter was a good name ?
Even the musical band of the same name aknowledged the name of the app, what more those "journalists" need ?
maloki@nolan hahahaha!
Daniel Honigman@Danielhonigman These are all joke quotes. But they're so close to the truth it's really hard to tell
Bob Mottram@nolan I think those names are already taken. Some journalists really don't seem to like the name. I like extinct megafauna, but perhaps my tastes are not so normative. It's also easy to forget how absurd "Twitter" and "tweeting" sounded a decade ago, as in "Too many twits are tweeting".
Oh and btw, as a name for a business "Yahoo" is completely ridiculous.
Oh and btw, as a name for a business "Yahoo" is completely ridiculous.
Nobody [LinuxWalt (@lnxw48a1)]LOL. As though any of those was a business-like name before the company's success made it so.
JBBdude@nolan "They should choose an enterprise-friendly name."
a) As if this is being positioned as an enterprise product. Federating PMs anyone? LGBTQIA+ and furry communities dominating development? What?
b) Slack. Github. Yammer. Nginx. Sure, there's also CloudFlare, AWS, EC2, Salesforce, and other "business-y" names, but it's clear that names are not destiny in tech.
a) As if this is being positioned as an enterprise product. Federating PMs anyone? LGBTQIA+ and furry communities dominating development? What?
b) Slack. Github. Yammer. Nginx. Sure, there's also CloudFlare, AWS, EC2, Salesforce, and other "business-y" names, but it's clear that names are not destiny in tech.
Lew Perin@nolan … or Apple.
ink slinger@nolan Haha! Totally this. I don't understand why so many people are complaining about the name. As if Twitter (originally planned to be Twittr, as per the vowel-dropping that was popular at the time) is a brilliant name that didn't sound stupid before it became ubiquitous.
Mainak ✔️@nolan those are not as business friendly name as you might think. The ideal business friendly name is "hooli". Ask Gavin Balson if you have any doubts about it. 😂
Hob, Slayer of Bugs@nolan Mecha-Mastodon?
I'll form the tusk!
SydneyEFalkI can't think of a single tech that couldn't be put in there and still have that sentence mean just as little.
"Java cannot survive with such a silly name."
"Bluetooth cannot survive with such a silly name."
Even "wireless" is arguably silly because it is a now-archaic common use term for a radio receiver in the UK
Dave Hunt@nolan I like the name Mastodon. Let's see if it has the long memory Elephants are said to have. :)
Chris Druif@nolan I know you understand it already but I wanted to voice my opinion, that's why I'm replying to you.
When something is community driven it doesn't matter that the name is "silly". Because there is no financial motivation behind it.
Btw, what about "Twitter" for a social network name. Or LinkedIn. That last one might be a "good" name, but nobody is using it 😂
Koz Ross@nolan I'm convinced now, more than ever, that 'tech journalism' is newspeak for 'Silly Valley propaganda'. 99% of it definitely fits that.
Klaske Wijkstra 🌻@nolan Are you serious?
Air fried chip butty@nolan Mastodon is a stupid name tho. ;-)
Jeremiah S. Junken@nolan Please, must have the source of this enlightened, inspired journalism... :-)
Katrus@nolan Wikipedia is irrelevant? Because it doesn't produce barrels of cash?
@Katrus *McBane voice* that's the joke
Matt ✅"irrelevant like wat?"
@nolan Whoa. Wikipedia is irrelevant? LOL.
The only way Mastodon will survive is WITHOUT venture capital!
This is messed.up.