Speaking as an MD, as someone who founded a medical technology blog in 2004, and closed it this year.
Not only TC collapsed but the whole blogosphere collapsed. The independent journalism has collapsed.
When Google and others take your content, crawl your site, store your data, use it and resuse it to serve targeted ads on memes, the journalism becomes a useless pursuit without salary. Google destroyed the internet.
I truly believe that Google de-ranked most blogs. Used to be they would put a mix of results (some blogs, even small time ones, some forums, some official sites) so that you’d probably get whatever you were looking for on pg1.
Now it’s far more corporate.
I probably shouldn’t have ranked as high as I did on my Joe Blow blog with better directions to my local passport office or phone numbers for my bank (because the bank’s website sucks and does anything but give you their phone number). But I could often make 1st, 2nd or 3rd result until I didn’t. My content was objectively more useful.
For a while, every Google update that people complained about just bumped me higher. Oh well.
I don't think it's even in question that Google de-ranked blogs and other independent sites. I remember Eric Schmidt talking about this publicly back when he was running things, saying that they were intentionally up-ranking larger corporate sites. Google had been the main way that blogs got new readers, then Google took that traffic away. It's no wonder that ecosystem has mostly died off, and Google deserve most of the blame for why the public internet has become such a bland corporate-controlled environment.
This may be why things like Substack and Beehiiv have taken off. The only way to combat reposting through Google is to deliver content directly to email inboxes before it gets ranked and reposted.
There is something additional at play with TechCrunch, though. Recently I feel like they haven't been posting as many articles that are about smaller startups as they used to. They tend to post more about Google, Nvidia, Intel, etc. I find myself reading it less and less because it's mostly news that you can also find elsewhere.
Yeah, this exactly. VCs fueled by low interest rates sold the world on free content forever and when the well dried up, all the legacy businesses that wanted to invest in quality and human capital were left holding the bag. It isn't just independent journalism that's suffering. Local journalism and even former stalwarts like Newsweek or Forbes have gone to pot.
Well, it wasn't just VCs. A lot of traditional mainstream media felt that they had to do something. A few like the NYT and The Economist arguably had strong enough brands to come out the other side with subscriptions. Maybe Bloomberg Business Week and some smaller pubs. Forbes, post Malcolm, sold their soul for clicks. A ton of others aren't quite as sad but bad enough.
"Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it."
-Ronald Reagan
The problem is that private institutions can become their own mini-governments. Reagan denied this, but his quite could equally apply to Apple or Google as it did to, say, late-70s US government.
"Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it."
-Ronald Reagan
FYI
"The head of the Russian General Staff Academy announced the threat of a “large-scale war in Europe”
The state agency RIA Novosti on Thursday reported on an article by Vladimir Zarudnitsky, head of the Military Academy of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation. The article was written in the departmental magazine “Military Thought” and was “at the disposal” of the agency.
The possibility of an escalation of the conflict in Ukraine into a large-scale war in Europe cannot be ruled out; the likelihood of Russia being drawn into new military conflicts is increasing, the main idea of the RIA Novosti article is retold.
“The possibility of an escalation of the conflict in Ukraine cannot be ruled out - from the expansion of participants in the ‘proxy forces’ used for military confrontation with Russia to a large-scale war in Europe,” wrote General Zarudnitsky.
“The main source of military threats to our state is the anti-Russian policy of the United States and its allies, waging a new type of hybrid war in order to completely weaken Russia, limit its sovereignty and destroy territorial integrity,” the general was quoted by Reuters, which also noted that a high-ranking A Russian military officer warned of the threat of the conflict in Ukraine escalating into a full-scale war in Europe.
Zarudnitsky's comments come as the West struggles to help Ukraine with more weapons and money after a failed counteroffensive, Reuters noted."
What is the alternative, curl up and cry? Doing anything (especially anything interesting) involves taking risks. Not to mention that I probably have more chances of being arrested or conscripted then actually suffering in an airplane accident, they are still quite safe. I don't think that worrying about everything, especially things as basic as an airplane travel, will do you any good.
It says something about the power of YouTube that Russian government still did not ban it, but it banned Facebook and Instagram. I suspect that banning YouTube might be dangerous to the putin regime.
Not only TC collapsed but the whole blogosphere collapsed. The independent journalism has collapsed.
When Google and others take your content, crawl your site, store your data, use it and resuse it to serve targeted ads on memes, the journalism becomes a useless pursuit without salary. Google destroyed the internet.
It's a tragedy for whole society.