Svbtle is hiring to build the future of news and opinion on the web

http://blog.svbtle.com/the-future

by dko • 14 years ago

51 52 14 years ago

blog.svbtle.com

petercooper2• 14 years ago

We’ve completely severed the relationship between content and revenue

It's a bold claim/goal with, in my experience, a dearth of successful precedent (in cases where there is non-trivial revenue, of course) and tells me the business model will certainly be interesting.

loceng• 14 years ago

I assume they're expecting to get free content creation from their curated selection of blog posters, and part of to keep 'quality' up offer editorial services. I see some flaws in what they're doing so far. Will have to see how they navigate it all. Certainly be interesting is right.

tptacek7• 14 years ago

You don't think that when they say they're looking for people to write long-form journalism, they expect to pay people to write long-form journalism?

revelation2• 14 years ago

It's really hard to tell if they want to be the future PandoDaily or The New York Times.

tptacek7• 14 years ago

It's really hard to understand what this comment means, as it boils down to "it's really hard to tell if they want to be the worst of online journalism or a rival for the best of it".

Is there some cue in the writing on this page that suggests that they're hoping to suck?

revelation2• 14 years ago

The one has a clear focus on tech and startups, the other has a broad network of correspondents spanning the world.

In retrospect, PandoDaily would probably make me jump to "terrible journalism", too.

antidaily• 14 years ago

Dustin designed PandoDaily's website.

(just kidding)

nobody_nowhere2• 14 years ago

can i short this company?

tptacek7• 14 years ago

No, but if you'd like to make a bet on it, and are happy to lose money, I'm probably happy to put $500 on the line, winnings to charity (mine's Partners In Health).

What would you like the terms to be?

nobody_nowhere2• 14 years ago

Sure! 36 months to deadpool. I'd do $200 to NGLTF.

rdl2• 14 years ago

I wish there were a convenient site to do bets like this. (My charity would probably be MAPS, but PiH is in my top 5).

bslatkin• 14 years ago

We've completely severed the relationship between us and reality

tptacek7• 14 years ago

I know it doesn't feel like it now, but I promise it will wear off. Next time don't take so much.

danielpal• 14 years ago

Great job ad. Journalism is historically a career were people are very unhappy. This is due to many many facts, which are hinted in the post. I bet theres a lot of great journalist that will read this and would want to jump into such opportunity.

gunter69• 14 years ago

Cool another propaganda network

SCdF3• 14 years ago

So I'm just a simple country lad who doesn't understand the big silicon valley city, but I really don't get svbtle. This is coming from someone who is (I imagine) part of 'the masses' who has been linked posts from there but otherwise has no involvement.

It's.. a curated collection of blogs? Why can't you just have a blog? I've probably been linked a dozen or so blogs inside that network (always from HN, I've never noticed traction anywhere else), but at no point has there been any cross promotion, so the fact that it was inside svbtle barely seemed to matter.

On 'barely': so far the fast majority of posts that have come out of svbtle have not actually been very good, and the curated 'we are the cream of the internet crop' pretentious feeling you get is not that positive.

Basicially, for me, a blog being inside svbtle seems to have negligible effect, and that effect is a negative one.

Maybe I'm missing the point though.

natural219• 14 years ago

I actually came here to post the exact opposite comment. I love all of the writers on svbtle, especially the ones that are linked often on HN (dcurtis, caldwell, etc), and I love the design.

SCdF3• 14 years ago

So that's cool, different strokes for different folks and all that, and I didn't want my trace-negative (it really is very small) opinion to be the main point.

My question to you is, has the fact that it's on Svbtle changed anything about it? Do you know follow everyone on that network because you presume they will be good?

So: if I was a great writer and I made a site that looked as nice would I be better or worse off compared to if I was under Svtble's umbrella?

damian20002• 14 years ago

I agree, something about it is pretentious. The title of svbtle.com is 'Svbtle : The essence of blogging' which reminds me of that advert in Zoolander where Derrick is advertising some sort of male facecream.

drharris• 14 years ago

This, for sure. Love the Zoolander comment; that's exactly the feeling I get about Svbtle. Even the name is pretentious. It smells of Silicon Valley circle jerk.

ericabiz• 14 years ago

Even worse, it's a curated collection of blogs...that all look the same!

Dave McClure posted a really thoughtful post about late bloomers recently, and the general reaction was "Wait...Dave McClure wrote that?" Yeah, you can't tell, because his blog looks exactly like 20+ other ones! This is the same pet peeve I had with WPTouch...everything looks the same and it destroys branding. (Not hoity-toity Fortune 500 company "branding"--just your picture on the blog, or something that indicates your blog is written by, you know, you, and not some anonymous random person. Especially when you are Dave McClure.)

To add a constructive point to this: http://jobs.problogger.net/ is a way, WAY better place to hire writers than a Hacker News post. We posted a job opening for some writers on there and got back some amazing resumes, including people who had media credentials galore and who had written for top newspapers and magazines. This seems like it'd be right up Svbtle's alley.

batista• 14 years ago

>Dave McClure posted a really thoughtful post about late bloomers recently, and the general reaction was "Wait...Dave McClure wrote that?" Yeah, you can't tell, because his blog looks exactly like 20+ other ones!

You're supposed to id a successful blogger by his writing style, not by the looks of his blog.

Did people have trouble reading Roger Ebert or H.L Mencken, because they wrote in a newspaper in the same type and pages as other people?

Plus, with an RSS reader, all blogs look even MORE the same.

rradu• 14 years ago

The benefit is mostly for the bloggers.

They get a UI which is custom-designed to focus on writing and little else. Dustin Curtis explains it here - http://dcurt.is/codename-svbtle

SCdF3• 14 years ago

I wonder why it's a curated list then. If the pull is that the blogging tools are really nice then it seems counter intuitive to not allow people to pay some money to use it, and instead require them to be this cool to ride the svbtle-coaster.

(the style of those blogs as a reader is OK, I've seen better and I've seen worse. If a blog has good content but is hard to read there are plenty of ways of fixing it, so design is not a big deal).

dorian-graph3• 14 years ago

Why are there so many people here on HN to reflexively find Svtble pretentious and whatever similar adjectives they use??

When it was first shown, there was a common feeling in the posts of not being picked by a kid at school to play in the lunch time soccer team. :P

The internet, and I guess I'll say life in general, needs more curation and less dumping. We speak of design and other wonderful things yet we encourage mindless undesign dribble in apparent content creation, relationships and other ways—it strikes of me being partial whores.

jmduke• 14 years ago

A lot of the blogs on svbtle aren't very good.

That is not to disparage the platform itself -- I like the style and the emphasis it places on content -- nor Dustin, who I find pretty fascinating, but the blogs just aren't good. I don't mean 'not good' in the sense of 'oh, this is poor writing', but in the sense of 'the consumption of this content was not worth my time.'

A few examples: - Dave McClure, who I admire and respect, writing a ridiculous blog post about 'hoping to be a late bloomer.' Dude, you have a Wikipedia article about yourself.

- Dalton Caldwell, who's proved himself time and time again to be prescient (his 2010 YC speech is wonderful in its truths), has been blogging about the importance of app.net. If I'm a developer, a tweeter, and a general tech enthusiast who, after three pretty lengthy blog posts, still doesn't understand what a "decentralized real-time feed" is -- let alone why its important -- then something is wrong.

- Dozens of fluff pieces which serve as little more than porn for the SV crowd.

I want Svbtle to succeed, and honestly think it will. I don't think that success is going to come when its definition of 'curation' involves what it currently does.

lmm3• 14 years ago

The whole notion of a "curated blogging platform" is inherently pretentious. It's an assertion that the curator has better taste than me.

(And don't worry, I'm not being inconsistent; I find designers pretentious too, and design fanboys more so)

wmf• 14 years ago

"make something noteworthy" — interesting choice of words. Nothing is noteworthy until Svbtle chooses to take note of it.

marcamillion• 14 years ago

Err....what? Am I missing something here? While I know Dustin is a "design genius"...did he raise some money or is there some monetization plan (in the short term) that I am not aware of?

I mean, I fully agree with the premise of the current state of journalism.

This solution does seem awesome - it's one of the reasons I love The Economist.

But as a potential writer, I am not keen on necessarily jumping into something where I don't know what the future might look like.

Zaheer• 14 years ago

Beautiful format and great bloggers. I love the sheer simplicity of the site and focus on quality content. Every time I'm linked to Svbtle blog I am really genuinely interested on what the writer has to offer because you've done a great job of maintaining quality. Looking forward to these new writers!

mvzink2• 14 years ago

Based on Curtis' explanation of Svbtle[1], I took "the essence of blogging" to be more in the graphical design sense. I wonder what Curtis (and who else is behind Svbtle?) imagines "the future of news and opinion" looks like, and whether he's/they're thinking about it in the socioeconomopolitical sense as well as the graphical design sense.

[1] http://dcurt.is/codename-svbtle

mvzink2• 14 years ago

On another, unrelated note, I'm excited to see a company whose first hiring post on HN is for writers and reporters, not engineers. Interesting times!

vipervpn• 14 years ago

Love the design of the blog. It's brilliant. So swish. The problem is they all look the same, and it kills the branding aspect of it.

Still, there is a very clever plan unfolding and it's pretty cool. Look forward to seeing more.

malandrew• 14 years ago

I get the impression that Svbtle is more trying to be the TED network of blogging (with a focus only on the T and not the ED right now), since most of the people who've been invited to participate are accomplished in tech some way.

trevorturk• 14 years ago

I'll stick to 9rules.com, thank you very much

pbiggar• 14 years ago

When I read this, I see my old YC2010 startup NewsLabs/NewsTilt. I maintain that was a good idea, but I wasn't the one to do it. My lessons are at http://blog.paulbiggar.com/archive/why-we-shut-newstilt-down, and it looks like Dustin has a handle on most of it.

Dustin has a lot that we didn't - a good sense of design, a large following, writers already contributing, and from the look of this, some cash. We had writers too, but they were checking out the latest fad, not actually writing for their own purposes. We didnt have the followers/brand awareness to bootstrap traffic - I think svbtle does.

I think he's doing some of the things which for us were mistakes, but they might not be in the context of svbtle. For example, we also made our own CMS instead of using wordpress. That was definitely a mistake for us, but I'm not convinced it is here - could go either way.

He's making the branding all about svbtle instead of about the journalist. That was definitely a mistake for us, again I'm not positive it is a mistake here - svbtle actually has a brand (even if some people think its a pretentious one).

He's making it about journalism instead of about blogging. I think that's a mistake. Journalism is a horrible niche to be in and I would hate to be a journalist. It has expectation of journalistic purity and a hypocritical hype machine around traffic. Better to be a blog network - I think it's closer to what svbtle is now and I believe that has the potential to be bigger than just journalism.

We werent motivated by journalism - I've never heard of Dustin being either. I think he made svbtle to be a better blog, so why not focus on that? I could be wrong here - I dont know Dustin well at all.

I think they're aiming for the right level of writer - definitely those who want to make something for themselves. We didnt: http://blog.paulbiggar.com/archive/why-we-shut-newstilt-down...

Anyway, this looks like it might work. I cringe when I read about it because it brings back the awful memories of a failed startup, but I could see this succeeding. Best of luck Dvstin!

Svbtle is hiring to build the future of news and opinion on the web

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