Alex Payne points to a blog post by Ben Laurie that discusses Diaspora and Haystack, and how projects like these can attract huge amounts of press, only to flame out as their charismatic founders’ incompetence is revealed.
I agree with Ben’s post, but it’s worth being a bit more explicit about what allows these situations to arise: the quality of most tech journalism is abysmal. I mean really inexcusably bad. Mainstream publications regularly assign writers to cover the software industry that have a level of understanding regarding the field that would be unacceptable in an intern. The most esteemed practitioners in the tech press are either focused on the consumer electronic user experience or are building personal brands around faith-based tech triumphalist movements.
In this sort of environment, it should be no surprise that an embarrassing hype cycle can emerge — one that talented self-promoters will use to enhance their status and wealth. I find it difficult to assign all that much blame to those self-promoters: the whole problem is that they don’t know any better. What more can we expect? Besides, it’s very easy to start believing your own bullshit once people with seemingly-meaningful professional credentials start validating it. Self-promoters will self promote; it’s not realistic to expect them to be the ones providing diligence.
I suspect that the problem may have to do with the structure of the industry: if you know much about it, you’re probably going to be able to make more money participating in it than writing about it. I don’t know enough about finance to really judge, but it seems as though that press sector suffers from a similar systemic disability — certainly all can agree that the financial press didn’t cover itself in glory in advance of the recent financial crisis. Once that story became big enough, talented generalist journalists filtered in and did the job properly.
But unless and until the skill premium for the software industry diminishes relative to journalism I’m not sure there’s a good way to align incentives in a way that fixes this problem. The best we can do is to recognize that the journalists who wrote excitedly about Haystack and Diaspora made a mistake; they were fooled, and they wasted our time. There’s no need to tar and feather anyone, but their credibility needs to suffer if we want this situation to improve.
Maybe we don’t need it to improve! It’s not that important, to be perfectly honest. But it sure does bug the hell out of me.
I join you in lamenting the deplorable state of tech journalism, but I don’t care so much about ill-founded hype. People take risks and try new things all the time and hype is a part of that, and in fact it’s part of the incentive to succeed – letting people down sucks.
Even with bad journalism surrounding it, if the Diaspora team had made their code open source from day 1, the hype would have diffused in a manageable way along a spectrum of time, and security issues could have been discussed from the beginning. Same for Haystack. I just don’t understand why these teams felt like they needed to operate in stealth mode like some kind of sexy startup. When it comes to open source public interest projects, stealth mode is a sign of some kind of emotional dysfunction.
I’ve always been surprised that no site has ever sprung up to combat the “irrational exuberance” of the Techcrunches with wit, a measured bit of cynicism and intellect. Something like the Awl, but turning a wry and wary eye on the absurdities of the tech industry. I suppose it would take balls of steel and a thick skin to write, but it would be captivating reading for sure.
Ah! I take it you’re not familiar with the work of Ted Dziuba — most specifically his now-shuttered blog, uncov? It was all that you describe and more (the “more” largely consisting of potshots at Michael Arrington and a sensibility taken from /b/). Dziuba became somewhat chastened when his own overthought startup failed to take off, but for a while there his writing was performing an incredibly valuable last-sane-man-in-an-insane-world / you-blew-it-all-up-you-damn-dirty-apes sort of function. His writing at his blog and The Register are still worth a look.
Will definitely check him out. Sorry I missed out before he flamed out.