Arrington is now officially an asshole
Posted by Karoli in Uncategorized October 30th, 2006
[Apologies in advance to those offended by language and others who couldn't give a rip about this issue]
Dear Mike Arrington,
Will you please pay attention at least long enough to get your facts straight?
If you had gone all the way through the disclosure.org screens, you’d have seen the final result, which would have included the invitation to:
a) Tweak any language so that it honestly represented your blog; and b)Join the conversation.
Instead of bothering, you just posted a big slam.
Big Bad Techcrunch Man is throwing his weight around like a schoolyard bully. It’s becoming more and more obvious to me that there’s a backstory here, a history, some reason that you’re so against this that goes beyond your supposed ‘love of the blogosphere’. You’re not interested in any conversation that wasn’t your idea, and if you gave a damn about the blogosphere and its integrity you would be jumping up and down about the shilling that happens on the so-called ‘legitimate’ blogs.
Comparing this to big tobacco funding just proves you’re an asshole again and again. People like you write with the express intention of raising emotions (and buzz for your own blog) while stifling rational thought and conversation. In other words, you’re shrill and hysterical. But not to worry, I’m sure you’ll have Jason championing your cause. And to think that I once had respect (and said so publicly more than once) for both of you.
Obviously you’re more interested in throwing your weight around than you are with having any kind of conversation, and so you get my Asshole of the Week award, and my dropped subscription from all of your various blogs AND a conscious effort to boycott any company that you recommend or have an interest in. In fact, I had planned to use CarsDirect but have decided against it and will choose another option for my car purchase.
Update #1:
Matthew Ingram thinks Arrington is letting his hatred of PPP get the better of him. Teresa Valdez Klein thinks there’s room to develop best practices around PayPerPost. Over at Blogher, Jeneane Sessum doesn’t think we need the Transparency Police. Shane Ede (thatedeguy) agrees.
Update #2
Kudos to Robert Scoble for actually going through the DisclosurePolicy.org screens and posting the result. He has some good feedback about the input screens that’s worth considering.
Shelley Powers points out that Arrington’s Techcrunch parties are undisclosed revenue streams, and observes:
For all of this, Michael makes a lot of money, yet I haven’t seen Michael put up a disclosure that says:
I am throwing this party because I just bought a new gas guzzling SUV–in black, I am so cool–and I have to pay for it. I don’t really want to meet you all, but I want you to want to meet me so I continue making a lot of money from desperate startups burning through their first round of funding. You can come for free, but you’re going to run a gauntlet of people wanting to sell you something, and most likely being disappointed when they find out you’re not really a somebody. And if you approach me, you better be worth my time.
Finally, commenter Bill posted this link to a recent Valleywag article (I found this on digg tonight, too) about a Techcrunch article which appears to be edited to remove disclosure about Arrington’s relationship with Maya’s Mom, a startup that recently received VC funding.
Update #3
This post was dugg yesterday and linked over at Valleywag, too, so welcome and thank you to visitors from those two sites. The Digg folks actually had a fair point — that Digg is not really intended for posts like this one that’s clearly a rant, but I do hope that the folks who landed here read the more reasonable and intelligent posts I linked in the updates.
Technorati Tags: techcrunch, arrington, bias, assholes
…living life in 19/7 time 
What’s the trophy look like? A donut with a big gaping hole in it? *smile*
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Nothing I like better than a thoughtful, well-reasoned post.
Reading your diatribe convinces me even more that Arrington is dead-on, and you’re a greedy, opportunistic shill.
Hello, Bob H.
Prove that I’m a greedy shill. Show me where I’ve deceived anyone. Take the challenge.
You can either leave a comment here or on your own blog, except you didn’t link your own blog so I guess leave it here.
Otherwise your condemnation leaves you in the land of the ignorant and uninformed, just like Arrington.
Simple, if you are creating a widespread market for deception you are doing a bad thing for the world. Sorry, I hate to be like this but you are acting like the ugly red headed stepchild to spam. You are taking a pure medium like blogging and tainting it with your un-innovativee mal-inspired poison. Live with it–I won’t loose any sleep.
Jason
You haven’t shown me here on this blog how I’ve created any kind of widespread market for deception, Jason.
More to the point, you HAVE been given exactly what you asked for — disclosure and a policy for disclosure. So why aren’t you joining the conversation?
I won’t lose sleep either. AND I can look myself in the mirror in the morning, something I’d have trouble doing if I were using whatever clout I had to stomp on folks less fortunate than myself.
For the sake of boneheaded argument, I’ll take the easy route. The answer to your question is, you don’t have to be deceptive, you can stuff your guidelines under your pillow when you sleep at night knowing you have just put the wrong idea in a million lower than you if possible idiot’s heads, who will exploit your business method until it reaches the lowest common denominator just like any idea or concept that holds any value on this effing planet. Drunk on koolaid 2.0–you couldn’t think of anything that would add to the conversation and so now you’ve just tainted the quality of every conversation on the web.
Don’t act like what you’ve done is bright either, you no more than an extension to fake forum dwellers who get paid. Big whooptie. You are the type of person who makes things trendy, not because you bring it in, but because you escort people out the door.
What netscape has created is more evil than what Microsoft has done to them.
And so you prove that you also haven’t actually looked at any posts I’ve written, or you’d know immediately that the approach you describe isn’t mine.
And you claim you are not part to deception. You live the tainting of the earth none the less
Arrington questioning the veracity of disclosure policies?
TechCrunch is well known for their (non)disclosures.
http://www.valleywag.com/tech/techcrunch/disclosure-scrubbed-at-techcrunch-210794.php
i just checked the disclosurepolicy website.
tried to generate a policy for my blog.
My blog ‘earns money with advertising’ but ‘does not insert paid posts’.
I dont see any options in the policy generator which suit my blog.
am i missing something? or is disclosurepolicy.org not for me?
Hi Rayne,
The options in the menus are intended as a place to start. Once you’ve gone through and the text is generated, I’d suggest tweaking it to fit your particular style/blog/whatever. It’s only intended to be a beginning. It would also be cool for you to leave comments in their forums about what specific tweaks you made to get it to fit your blog, just as a way for others to get some ideas.
I’d just delete the references to paid posts and leave the advertising part in there.
You shouldn’t view the result from the generator tool as the be-all and end-all — just a beginning for you to shape into something that works for you.
DnW
[...] TechMemeDrumsNWhistlesTinFinger [...]
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