Why #Gawker is so Awful

everyone knows that gorka is the cancer of the internet i don't think people quite know why gorkha is so bad but i can explain it gawker media was founded in 2003 by nick denton with gawker itself being the flagship blog edited by elizabeth spyers spies didn't remain in her position for long and gawker for the next 10 years had a relatively high turnover of editors i think this high turnover of editors left denton as the main personality driving gawker i think denton's philosophy and probably to a large extent his personality has shaped gawker into what it is today and what gawker is today is a 300 million dollar blogging network that has not only gawker itself which is focused primarily on gossip but is also branched out into various specialty blogs these include but are not limited to jalopnik which describes itself as a daily automobile news and gossip site for those obsessed with the cult of cars deadspin a sports news and commentary site with a humorous slant io9 we come from the future which is a science and tech blog jezebel which is a radical feminist propaganda blog life hacker a daily weblog on software and personal productivity recommendations gizmodo a tech and gadgetry blog kataku a well-known video game blog and a subsection of the main gawker site called defamer of which the name is the description much like goku media itself the name gawker describes gawker media in its entirety every article written by a gawker property is designed to make you stop and stare and there is literally no limits to what gorka will do to make you pay attention take for example the time that gorka ruined an interactive advertising campaign by coca-cola you could go on twitter tweet something at the twitter bot that would then take what you had said and turn it into a nice happy picture quite amusingly gawker set up a bot to tweet sections of mein kampf at the coca-cola bot making it produce make it happy tweets that revolved around white supremacy this became a problem to the point where coca-cola suspended the campaign and that's all well and good nobody's against a bit of harmless trolling but there seem to be very few depths that gorka won't plum and i'm really not joking when i say that for example when hackers get hold of a celebrity's amazon orders gorka are quite happy to show that person's entire beauty regime with you right down to the pubic hair dye i'm not joking when i say there is nothing gawker won't print for the sake of decency these are just a few examples but they really do remind you that the website is called gawker it's not called thinker or ponderer it's called gawker they want you to gawk and if there's one thing that's guaranteed to get people gawking it's outing gay people who are pretending to be straight gorka does this with surprising frequency with the most recent example being gawker outing a man named david geithner the cfo of conde nast and a private citizen who had the misfortune of being related to an ex-obama administration official geifler was a closet homosexual who's married with a family and probably wished his status to remain private but the escorts got wind of who he was and tried to use knowledge of geithner's personal life to blackmail him into pulling strings in his favor gotham refused so the escort leaked this information to gawker and of course gorka had no problem publishing this as you can imagine gorka has earned a reputation from this which is why i began the video by calling gawker the cancer of the internet because it absolutely is and i am not the only person who has seen this gorka has a long history for a blogging network and in that time they have caused controversy of the controversy and to the point where people are openly denouncing them as being the worst of the internet or simply decrying them for ruining people's lives a thing of which nobody at gawker appears to feel any shame given this track record it's no great surprise that when people were given the opportunity to push back against gawkers frankly unseemly practices they pushed back really hard in august of 2014 a consumer revolt known as gamergates began online journalism in the gaming industry has long been corrupt and frankly people had had enough this online scuffle probably wouldn't have been too big a deal had the game journalists themselves been able to admit the corruption within their ranks and weed it out instead what they did is decide to censor all discussion on the subject and actively collaborate to attack their audience and position themselves as anti-gamer and yes gawker's gaming blog kataku was one of those anti-gamer websites that were leading the charge this attack on their own readership backfired if you can believe that and gamers decided to email gawker's advertisers in what they called operation disrespectful nod this was exactly as simple as it sounds gamers simply sat down wrote emails detailing their grievances with gawker and then sent them to gawker's advertisers often these emails would list direct grievances that people had with gawker and list direct ethical violations like this someone on twitter tweets using the gamergate hashtag saying people are trying to put sjw stuff in video games docks them and their families raytheon and northrop grumman are the biggest exporters of bias in video game journalism we should flood congress with emails gamergate this is clearly an attempt at trying to sound like someone who supports gamergate but it's not very convincing especially to someone who actually does support gamergate like roy here putting sjw stuff in video games isn't unethical but doxxing is why would someone from gamergates want to doxx anyone raytheon and northrop grumman are the exporters of bias in video games journalism that's in itself is a nonsense statement and what good would flooding congress with emails do instead of blindly believing what virgil texas says roy decides simply to google his linkedin profile which reveals this person to be an employee of gawker conducting a false flag operation and for some reason they think demanding roy delete the post is going to have an effect and with the jig finally up our gawker employee tries to un-ironically suggest that this information was obtained illicitly and publicized without permission well too bad buddy and you remember you work for gawker right operation disrespectful nod was actually a roaring success it really gave gawker a massively bloody nose which led to gawker publicly licking their wounds claiming that they got rolled by the dishonest fascists of gamergate boohoo max boohoo operation disrespectful nod by gawker's own admission cost them seven figures but more importantly it got some of the more hot-headed gawker staff writers to take to twitter and make absolute bloody fools of themselves these public outbursts were actually a real boon to people who supported gamergate not only did they provide them with concrete examples of why advertisers shouldn't support gawker but they also forced public apologies and retractions that are just almost as embarrassing as the original tweets but more importantly gawker's own writers became a liability and it was in the interest of gawker management to get rid of anyone quickly who became a problem this forced gawker's writers to unionize against their management this is because gawker's writers are becoming an unnecessary expense gorka spent millions of dollars creating a new kind of micro blogging platform called kinja and kinja's motto is that commenters are just as important as writers under the kinja model commenters and microbloggers will provide the majority of the site's value with writers functioning mostly as cocktail hosts that's right gawker's writers are being made obsolete by their own audience these micro bloggers would be disposable and interchangeable almost making gawker a new form of social media and if one of them says or does something on twitter that causes a massive outrage or controversy before millions of dollars are lost in advertising revenue that person can simply be banned at very little cost to gawker themselves but getting rid of writers isn't the end of gawker's problems because quite often they will go on to spill gawker's secrets and tell people exactly what it's like to be an employee at gawker recently fired writer william arkin describes it like social media as a whole it's also a miserable place so driven by its own feverish pursuit that it has no clue what kind of world it inhabits and thus helps build and he says that they are making the world a miserable place and he's glad that he's out of it it's hard to argue that this isn't the case gossip and rumor mongering are really good things they rarely have any positive upside to them especially to gawker management themselves while they might be the bread and butter of gawker they might also be the thing that kills it because it's not just gamers and gawker's own staff that are pushing back against gawker management there are some really heavy hitters going after gawker take for example 90s wrestling star hulk hogan someone leaked to gorka a sex tape of him having sex with his friend's ex-wife which gorka gleefully displayed for all the world to see hogan took legal action a judge ruled in his favor and gorka have flat refused to take down his sex tape so hulk hogan has filed a hundred million dollar lawsuit against gawker which has the potential to bankrupt the company so naturally not having a leg to stand on gawker decided to fight dirty they decided to leak an alleged transcript of the sex tape in which hulk hogan refers to fucking niggers even if this is true it won't really have much of a bearing on hogan's lawsuit with gawker but again it's a dirty tactic and it appears to have had a direct effect on the wwe after they removed all reference to him from their website and disowned him of course the story of hulk hogan's battle with gorka wouldn't be complete without gawker making total asses of themselves and being giant hypocrites when jennifer lawrence's nude photos were leaked onto the internet writers for gawker's feminist blog jezebel were not happy how dare a website like 4chan host nude photos of a celebrity without their consent this is an outrage these photos have been hosted on a porn site and a judge has ruled they don't have to take them down until she can prove she owns the copyright to them this is even more of an outrage how dare they and no we will not be removing hulk hogan's sex tape denton himself is confident that the law is on their side he's dropped by the wwe for racist remarks that would seem to put him on the ropes a little bit maybe helps your case i think it shows something of his motivation that maybe explains why he's been so forceful in fighting this particular case um but the the facts of our dispute with hulk hogan are clear the law is clear and we look forward to the chance of defending the story in the courts since denton is so interested in talking about issues of motivation let's go back to what's happened with the david geithner scandal after massive public outrage gorka actually pulled the story one that denton himself ordered to be removed which as you can imagine is a very rare occurrence for gawker but don't make the mistake of thinking that it's anything to do with the content i'm actually not nearly as british as people think i am i'm a gay hungarian jew so i'm going to be as home in new york as i am in london despite himself being gay denton does not care that he is outing other public figures as being gay or in this case a private figure and this despite being a gay man who himself has lived in the closet and this is because he believes that people are happier when they live in the truth and for some reason this gives him license to operate as he does we will continue to publish stories like that that's what people are wondering and we will continue to defend stories like that and i am proud that we defend stories and we publish stories that many other media organizations will not touch not because they're bad stories but because they're fearful of the consequences would you out a private person again the way this blog post did we would absolutely out a public figure in denton's mind the distinction that made this story a bad story wasn't the fact that it was salacious nonsense it was simply that the person involved wasn't a public figure and denton's particularly warped moral compass enables him to justify doing this on the grounds that apparently people are happier living in truth as if that is his decision to make it's interesting that he mentions consequences because there may well be more consequences indeed this means more lawsuits and gawker staff the proverbial rats that they are have decided that this sinking ship was not worth staying on how does denton justify this well he claims that the problem is that they are men of principle and the fact that denton has intervened and pulled an article means that they can't guarantee gawker's editorial integrity prepare your sides the editorial independence of the company is not just a principle it's the core of our mission is the core of the company you say that but your two top editors resigned i asked them to come on the program today and they declined but they resigned because of you meddling they would say with the newsroom both of both max reed and tommy craggs uh men of considerable principle and sometimes inflexible principle ah yes the considerable and inflexible principle of being able to publish whatever salacious gossip they want the social media firestorm the gorkharas bananda from the publishing of the geithner story has caused denton to publicly claim that gokura is undergoing a relaunch and they are reconsidering quote the role of niceness in journalism saying the new relaunched version of gorka will be 10 to 15 percent nicer than the old one however this isn't going to solve any of gawker's problems because gawker's problems do not come from how nice they are gawker's problems come from the way that they operate and fundamentally the way that they operate is dictated by nick denton but it was my decision i am the founder of the company i was the editor of goku.com i am the guardian of the editorial ethos of the company this was counter to what i want us to be doing and therefore i had it taken down the problem with gawker media is nick denton's complete lack of scruples is there any place you won't go is there any subject that's off limits uh our company lawyer asks me that question sometimes and i try to i don't like to define the answer and this can be seen most strikingly in the way gawker operates and the incentives it offers to its employees meet 45 year old nick denton who says the key to his success is breaking all the rules here are the words most often used to describe gawker you tell me true not true snarky yeah sexual nude photos of private parts if it's interesting you report rumors you don't always check it out shameless um yes irresponsible defined by who mean occasionally but the web is different um that we publish faster we change faster we correct faster and frankly the standards our standards of publication are lower all the things that never get published and never get broadcast those are the stories that we run we run the off cuts you know the things that you're too precious to run so from denton's own mouth the standards are lower in fact they seem to be so low as to have been abandoned entirely this is going to sound really really pretentious but i believe in the larger truth and i believe that the truth has arrived at often in a rather messy fashion and that gossip is part of the process that that will put out a story and it'll be rough and ready and then frankly television and newspapers will kind of come and follow on like a day or two later once we've done the dirty work and he has abandoned journalistic standards because he knows that someone else will come along and clean up his mess what was your vision for gawker when you started that it should be authentic and it should capture real the real conversations the things that people actually talk about denton's somehow forgetting here that a lot of the time people talk about bullshit but okay so denton is a gossip monger who's enamored with scandal and there is literally nothing he won't print let's have a look at his operation let's see if there's anything in his operation that might help explain it further his empire is now housed in these trendy downtown offices complete with a roof deck for parties and the bloggers have grown up and over there 38 i'm 33 37. they're well paid they get insurance they do they get a 401k plan and they're well educated harvard princeton stanford even this some of us here do have master's degrees in journalism from colombia sorry for pausing it's on baldilox's face here but you can see the problem again they're all in the same office very much sharing the same work culture and ethics or lack thereof but i'm sure they're all working very very hard let's see exactly what they're doing most posts are cannibalized items taken from other sources repackaged topped off with catchy headlines right so they spend their time finding interesting stories that other people have written stealing them ripping them off giving them a click bait headline and then pumping them out to the world well that's great to what end why would anyone do this we're living in the gawker age where news is driven by what will draw a crowd or in this case a click this is the most terrifying thing we have to show you here for traditional journalists because it's as if every single day is every single week of sweeps and the numbers tell the whole story it's called the big board and it displays the second by second traffic on all of gawker's sites it's a popularity contest and the bloggers know what drives traffic and here we are looking at the black heart of gawker everything about their site is to simply increase the number of people who click on it because that is of course ad revenue by hook or by crook there is no means to foul for them to take there is no depth they will not stoop to there is nothing they won't do to get you to look at their site and increase their numbers gawker destroys people's lives it ruins their relationships it breaks up families all to squeeze a few more pennies out of their ad revenue denton's proud of this he grins like a fucking lunatic thinking i'm doing such a great thing i'm making so much money by abandoning standards and i suppose the last question we have to ask ourselves is what kind of person would voluntarily work for gawker likely emily gould she's the editor of the website gawker.com hello emily hi jimmy you look like a very pleasant woman and uh but i have to say that tell everyone what you do what goes on on your website well i i think that maybe the issue that you have might be with our gawker stalker map am i right well yeah i mean i think that to well explain what that is exactly the gawker stalker map uh tells you where celebrities have been cited in new york city at any given time so you can sort of scroll around and see you know jude law was shopping for condoms at the duane reed in midtown or so if people are out and they have their cell phones they can send a little message to you and say i just saw um i just saw uh gwyneth paltrow at the movies and that way when gwyneth paltrow comes out of the movies there can be at least a dozen psychopaths waiting for her that's actually a popular misconception about the way the stalker map works it doesn't really happen in real time i think that's why george clooney got so upset because he thought we were actually she's right here sometimes there's a couple of hours that elapse between when it's a stalking like a stalking it's not actually what is the shortest delay that that you'll have i mean is it sometimes can it be 15 minutes after they see a celebrity um it can be but it's rare really rare i've had my clients in five minutes you've had like five i've had them in a store going these if you think she is unbearable so far it gets worse my problem is you post things that simply aren't true on the site and you do no checking on your stories whatsoever i'll give you an example there was a story about me that popped up on my google search it said dally gawker stalker when isn't jimmy kimmel visibly intoxicated and there's a story about me being visibly in toxic i know maybe funny to you but i didn't find it that amusing okay and a matter of fact this story that talks about me being drunk i was coming home from my cousin's my one-year-old cousin's birthday party with my elderly aunt and uncle and my kids and my cousins and i was the i mean i may have been loud but i was far from intoxicated and you put these things on there's i mean i know you're an editor what exactly are you editing from the website there's a whole other aspect of our website that doesn't have anything to do with this document but what the stalker map is is citizen journalism people don't read it with the expectation that every word of it will be gospel everyone who reads it knows that it isn't checked at all what they read it for is the immediacy and i don't you get an uncertainty you get an unfiltered sort of the way that people perceive celebrities in real time that you don't get from any other media and that's what i think you also get what is essentially slanderous statements or libelous statements put on your website i mean for instance today there was i noticed there was something about kevin costner i went on to see what was there today and it just said how fat kevin costner was and then had a picture of jabba the hutt next to him now i know you you know you sell advertising i don't know why anybody would buy advertising on a website but i don't know what the point of of something like that is there's also a big contradiction she said citizen journalism she used the word journalism and then said everybody knows not everything's true most journalism journalists at least try for the truth it's a goal i mean do you read us weekly and expect that everything and it is true or star i think we actually probably take calls from them fact checking and i don't from your website that's absolutely true us weekly at least has a legal department that vets things and our photographers at least are taking photographs of things that are happening as opposed to i mean i just want you to think about your life and um weigh your options and uh i mean because i would hate to see you arriving in helen somebody sending a text message saying guess who's here you know what i'm saying honestly i think that there's a shifting definition of what is public and what is private space for everyone not just celebrities the internet blogs myspace no one has the reasonable expectation of being able to walk down the street and not have what they're doing be noticed by someone well that's just that is just a terrible thing though isn't it i mean is it really i mean i think it's great we're not putting people up on a pedestal and worshiping them anymore i think it's good that people are acknowledging celebrities at them though i mean it seems to me that celebrities are protected by piles of money from those rocks no no no no no and by the way not all celebrities are wealthy i mean you know that's a silly and stupid thing to say you know that come on now just because people have money means it's okay to to say false things about them to tear them down it's not okay to say false things about anyone else well you should check your website then thank you for talking to us anderson cooper 360 is on at the top of the hour can you even imagine what it's like to talk to someone like that well i can because i have i had a debate with a jezebel writer about gamergate and well this is how that debate ended at a career that is an industry blacklist that is the issue i don't know and i really think that you are arguing in bad faith by repeatedly trying to reframe the question in ways that i think you know are disingenuous i mean i think you know it's disingenuous to say that gamergate doesn't engage in the harassment of women but you continue to make that claim too so i don't know i kind of don't know what to say i think i think that i think that we've come to the point where there's no point carrying on then because i are you quitting what do you mean am i quitting are are you giving up i mean let's no let's let's keep on let's keep on doing this i mean unless you really believe so what what what good would come of this so okay if we're no no we're why you think that people people felt the need to create a tool where they had to block i want to know why you won't answer a single question i'm asking you i want to know what you think what good will come of continuing this discussion answer it i mean i think that maybe eventually if we keep talking we can try to figure out uh you know what's next because i think we can both agree that gamergate in its current form is uh i don't want to say dying because i think that might offend you but is is changing shape is becoming something else so the question is what is next right what i mean when i say don't ask a question i want you to tell me what productive use continuing this conversation will have i mean maybe we can be friends i severely doubt that see there we go paul um thanks for inviting me on i appreciate it thanks for showing everyone thank you take care okay the incentives that gorka has as a company the way it operates attracts the worst kind of people people who won't take you seriously they won't take what they're talking about seriously and they will treat any interaction with you like a game because to them it is a game it's what they can draw out of you it's what they can take from you to get for clicks there's a reason everyone says that gawker is the cancer of the internet because it is and thankfully even google can see it gorka is to be penalized by a new fact-based search algorithm says google now i have my doubts about what google determines to be facts but the point of this algorithm isn't to base search results on popularity because as gawk have shown popularity can be artificially inflated truth be damned google are at least making an attempt to try and tie the most successful and therefore the most popular results to the ones that become the most factual and accurate so to reiterate nick denton's business practices his practices as quote unquote a journalist are the reason that gawker will always be the hell hole of the internet it's his bullshit philosophy that controls editorial policy it is the abandonment of standards and their warped system of incentives that attracts the scum of the earth to go and work there and they are so bad that they can unite in metaphorical arms against them thousands and thousands of people from all different kinds of walks of life to the point where google is taking action against them because what they are doing is polluting the world with their bullshit she was a big huge problem i mean when i read articles like that it doesn't sound like they're saying that gamers need to die or that gaming culture needs to die it sounds like they're saying that it's changing you know and part of the way that it's changing when you label it as gamers are over gamers are dead and you are talking about it and then when you call them uh shitlords in in the middle of it and things like that and you insult them with with vitrical words in your writings to your audience and you're insulting you're attacking your audience when you can come out as leia on the xoxo fest and say i i insulted and attacked my entire audience and i still have a job and i'm quoting that then yes that she intentionally did it to attack to attack her audience i mean it isn't that isn't this an example of what you're talking about of criticism versus harassment no that is not criticism when you start talking names to your own audience and so calling names is harassment no but when you have 14 articles dropped to suggest that everyone needs to be removed from gaming and that these people are bad people i don't know i don't say that as criticism i say that more as and then it's found out that it's planned then it just seems more as a push on the media rather than somebody's opinion of criticism if everybody's saying the same thing in the same day at the same time and then 150 of them are in a call saying yeah look guys we all put out the same articles together and then it gets promoted it gets published at breitbart and shows that it's true that that is what happened then that is not their opinion of criticism that is just basically them pushing a narrative that they want to push and it has been seen repeatedly and it's going to continue to be seen but um i think that's i think we've gotten really far though i think i'm glad that you came on anna i really am um yeah it was really interesting i mean i think we we really really fundamentally disagree about a lot of things but i also think that in light of what you're about to say it's really fascinating that you're saying that gamergate doesn't engage in harassment and there's not a harassment problem and i think that's where we're always going to differ but at least we can talk that is the important part we can have these discussions and we can act like human beings rather than people flinging crap all over twitter you know well except for me and carl i guess me and carl can't talk but i did try you did god help me yes well i appreciate being on anna i'm going to go ahead and address my the chat and then i'm going to wrap it up yeah that's gonna be fascinating i'll be listening all right all right i'll talk to you later oh my gosh what a stream ring sfo on who's that who's uh who's that phone oh well hey all right so paul you stand up for and you stand oh yeah of course i'm gonna stand with that what i had to say it's absolutely true all that stuff that was stated was true all right so yeah i know but it's you know what we got as best as we can get well chat okay um it's been it's been wonderful doing all these interviews and streams i think since since what was it august was it august or september since the beginning i've been doing these interviews for a long time i've brought in a huge amount of interviews for a lot of people that i think discussions that needed to be had and discussions that needed to be seen or heard so people understood the barriers that were between one type of group and another type group or whatever are you an anti-gay gator gamer or not even just that you know just just different opinions of people have or different statements and whether or not they're they're going to um and it's it's been a long an awesome ride with that being said uh i i feel i feel that at this time it is necessary to delete this channel i know you saw some of my twitter's my twitter stuff and you saw my uh my youtube's gone and everything like that i'm going to be deleting everything and uh and just starting over my own stuff and it's gonna if you ever find me it'll be pseudo psych political discussions of history and and stuff like that um i'm not leaving gamergate that's not intentionally what i'm leaving i'm just i'm

Channel: Sargon of Akkad

Views: 383,509

Rating: 4.9399323 out of 5

Keywords: funny, stupid, feminism, mra, news, comedy, Gawker (Blog), Blog (Industry), Stupidity (Quotation Subject), david geithner, kotaku, jezebel

Id: u2ih2OuqKXQ

Length: 41min 12sec (2472 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 29 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/92037]

It is interesting listening to this considering the recent judgement against them. I am sure there will be an appeal and some lesser amount will be awarded.

But, for me, anything that curbs this shit-stain of the internet is a good thing.

And please let's not use the word journalist when we try to describe anyone that has, does or will write for Gawker.