Steve Gillmor's Commenters Revolt

http://www.techcrunchit.com/2009/01/27/the-realtime-real-estate-crisis/#comments

by sutro • 17 years ago

19 13 17 years ago

brandnewlow2• 17 years ago

I've never once managed to get through anything written by that guy. I can emphathize a bit with his readers...but then why are they reading him?

TomOfTTB2• 17 years ago

His readers, at least the ones that comment, are the only part that is worth reading. It's actually kind of amazing how they latch onto one word or one sentence and then wrap their own views around that sentence as a way of "understanding" what Steve meant.

In the comment section quoted here you'll see several people who claim the piece made perfect sense to them and was a well written even though any rational person can see the piece is too vague to definitivly say anything.

geuis• 17 years ago

I would love to see someone hook up a Bayesian filter and some markov chain code to Gillmor's collected writings. Then have a free web service with an API that would allow you to develop Wordpress plugins to automatically have Steve Gillmore guest-post on your personal blog.

spolsky• 17 years ago

har har! I tried to parse ONE article he wrote once. It took several hours and turned out to be an enormous waste of time. The results are here:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/printerFriendly/items/2006/12/...

What I don't get is why people keep paying him to write this stuff (he's been doing it for years in InfoWorld) since he might be smart but he's clearly not a very good writer. My only guess is that the editors who hire him don't want to admit that they can't understand what he's saying.

brandnewlow2• 17 years ago

That's way more than the guy deserves!

I'd never heard of him before Arrington brought him on board. He had a few pieces on TechCrunch that week....but I couldn't make it past sentence 3 in any of them. The titles don't grab you and he uses words like "thusly."

People like to read interesting stuff.

If your stuff's not readable, then it doesn't matter how interesting it is.

brentr• 17 years ago

It's bloated writing. He tries to pass himself off as intelligent, but his rambling clearly shows this is not the case. When people use big words and obscure references, it's usually a sign they are trying to imitate intelligence.

lbrandy2• 17 years ago

I find myself writing like him sometimes. Sometimes you have complicated thoughts and you want to word certain things precisely and it comes out like a bad version of Dennis Miller with qualifiers on top of qualifiers, adjectives and adverbs all over the place... except most of us reread that and go 'whoooooaaa' and rewrite the whole mess.

pclark• 17 years ago

blatant use of Datapresser.

jwr• 17 years ago

I don't get it. So, if he writes crap, why do people upvote him on HN? Why did I even have to click the article? Don't we have better things to do?

lbrandy2• 17 years ago

"If we could interactively configure our screens to reflect our interests, publish them out via a social graph to our natural affinity and peer groups, and then test content and information flow against advertising models until we find the best mix…. The growth would be explosive, the stickiness fly-paper strength, the incentive for third parties to build and market to power users an offer they couldn’t refuse."

Say what now?

TrevorJ• 17 years ago

I get what he is saying, but what I don't get is he's basically describing the blogsphere as it is right now.

TomOfTTB2• 17 years ago

Whenever I read one of his posts (which is rarely now) I think of this cartoon...

http://tinyurl.com/cp5eqz

Pretty much says it all.

nrao123• 17 years ago

I can actually make out a Steve Gillmor article just by reading the summary on my RSS feed. Sometimes just by reading the headline. After that I NEVER click through to the rest of the article.

Steve Gillmor's Commenters Revolt

Related Stories