A requiem for Gawker
by Dave Winer Thursday, August 25, 2016

Mostly, I tried to keep Gawker and its subs at arm's length. 

I had mixed feelings about them. Some of their journalism was excellent and needed. We needed more news orgs to take on Apple. They were too controlling, and covered too much territory. They were stifling progress. 

There are many other tech companies that do the same.

But Gawker tended to go after individuals, and often not individuals at big powerful companies, just individuals, some who didn't even have a job. And when they did go after big execs it was often because they were caught being human. Which meant they became even more private, and less accessible, and their thinking became more introverted, narcissistic and inbred, even paranoid. So Gawker while it was sometimes a force for good, was often a source of pain for the people of the tech industry, and as a result had a negative net effect. 

News orgs have to strike a balance, and they have to appeal to the good nature of their readers. I know Nick doesn't think this way, but that's why I so rarely pointed to them, and why I so rarely wrote for them. I didn't trust them. 

There's a lot I didn't know about Gawker as a result.

Reading some of the postmortems, I think wow I should have tried to write for them. But then I remember how they attacked people I knew who were struggling to make a go of it in tech, and how they treated me even. They once wrote about a trip to the bathroom at a conference that I never took, another time criticized me for a personal ad that had run 15 years prior when I was in better physical shape. 

Mostly they were a source for bad in tech. So I understand how a guy like Thiel with too much money and an exaggerated sense of self-importance might do what he did. But that doesn't excuse it.