jimmygrapes two comments up stated that he believed coinbase expected the NYT would not be "being factual" and that he expected the article "written as an exaggerated hit piece full of emotional appeal rather than, well, news".
To which muglug replied extolling the irrefutable virtue of speaking truth to power-- which is an insultingly irrelevant response to someone accusing them of being non-factual.
> I wouldn't ever use the words truth and NYT - especially when it comes to cultural topics. And also geopolitical topics. Or anything of national significance. Or war. You get the idea.
Can you expand on that? It feels like you’re saying that the NYT lies (to greatly and possibly incorrectly paraphrase). But I don’t generally believe that to be true; and I haven’t seen much evidence to indicate they’ve been engaged in that kind of behavior. Certainly not often, if at all.
> Why is the NYT writing a hit piece on coinbase?
> When it comes to propaganda, it always helps to get out in front of the "story". I'm guessing that's what coinbase is doing.
Did the NYT write a hit piece on Coinbase? I haven’t read the article yet, since it hasn’t been published. No one has.
What I believe to be absolutely true is this: Coinbase desperately wants everyone to believe that it’s a hit piece. That’s obvious from the timing, tone, and things they actually wrote in the letter.
But at least in theory, the NYT higher goals and aspirations in life - to uncover and publish truth.
Coinbase doesn’t, and they live and die entirely by customers choosing to trust them with their business. They have every rational incentive to fight for you to trust them regardless of whether the NYT piece is true or not.
And what if it is true? Whatever it turns out to be (again: it’s not published).
To me, when a company launches into this kind of PR Hail Mary, it’s not a sign of integrity.
It seems to me that Coinbase is well aware of NYT's recent decline from paper of record to race-baiting propaganda, and knows that instead of being factual about numbers NYT will use weasel words to make it seem like Coinbase's entire company is run by "far right extremist racists" or whatever similar language. Of course, only time and the publication of the NYT article will tell, but given their recent track record I would absolutely not be surprised if it's written as an exaggerated hit piece full of emotional appeal rather than, well, news.
It's spot-on because the NYT told them ahead of time about the claims they were going to make, in the process of fact-checking those claims and offering Coinbase an opportunity to provide quotes to rebut them in the article, which opportunity Coinbase availed itself of.
What you’ve said and what I’ve said are not in conflict. Coinbase clearly states that they believe there to be three complaints and that they’re generally in the clear.
My point about reading between the lines is that the explicit, specific repetition of the claim and the way they’re saying it implies that the NYT is going to allege there were more complaints.
So then: what of the missing complaints? What Coinbase is saying, essentially, is that whatever else is alleged either didn’t happen (eg, the NYT is outright lying), or that they weren’t really complaints.
That’s what I’m getting at. It’s highly unlikely that the NYT is lying. I would be shocked if they did not verify in some way that the complaints alleged were indeed made to Coinbase. And I also do not think that Coinbase would accuse the NYT of lying either. It’s not a particularly defensible position.
So - that’s the reading between the lines. To me, the most plausible explanation is that the NYT will allege multiple complaints, and Coinbase is trying to say “no those don’t count.”
Criticism is not abuse. They’re also not doing the best job defending themselves since they offer no concrete proof, testimony, or narrative. Who were these employees? What happened? We don’t know, but are left with some empty promise of a statement that Coinbase “handled it internally.”
It is also possible that someone(s) at Coinbase, having complained about what they perceived as poor treatment back in 2019 and been blown off, decided to go to the NYT after Coinbase made lots of noise about "not being political."
I wasn't intending to engage in name-calling; I apologise if it came off that way.
I agree that the earlier story should have directly mentioned the severance Coinbase offered to employees who left. That being said, the severance was pretty tangential to the point of that earlier story: that different companies have very different policies on workplace activism, and Coinbase was taking a hard line on politics at work (no politics allowed at work).
That being said, the NYT omitting a salient but tangential fact in a different story about Coinbase written several months ago hardly smacks of conspiracy. I try to read news articles on their own merits, giving some consideration to the agenda of the publication (and, as I mentioned earlier, the NYT has a perspective just like every other publication). To me, Coinbase didn't really provide anything to refute the allegations in this story in their "prebuttal", and the portrait of the company that the NYT paints seems pretty convincing.
You appear to be arguing with the comment you wish that person had written, not they one they actually wrote. The actual comment is specific about the pattern of problematic comments they observed:
* They suggest that Black people are in general SJWs
* They attempt to litigate affirmative action rather than the claims in the article
* They argue that Black employees passed over for promotion were underqualified.
* They dismiss the entire article on the basis of it having appeared in the New York Times.
Take issues with any of these specific complaints if you want, but don't pretend that the comment simply said "there aren't enough anti-Coinbase comments here", because they didn't say that at at all.
It's interesting how spot-on Coinbase's 'prebuttal' was (https://blog.coinbase.com/upcoming-story-about-coinbase-2012...). There's very little in the NYT article that isn't mentioned. The only point of inaccuracy seems to be that the story was published on Friday morning, the day right after the prebuttal, not Sunday as originally suggested. Maybe the prebuttal forced NYT's hand?
As highlighted in the thread and in PG's reply, the default response to criticism of Coinbase is to nuke the conversation
As PG wrote:
> Strictly speaking I should have killed the post entirely
That's not why he said that. He explains further down thread:
HN is a news site, not a customer support forum for companies funded by YC, and in fact the site guidelines explicitly ask that it not be used that way
This piece paints coinbase as a company with racist tendencies and a hostile place to work for black people.
Based on the evidence or lack there of provided the article and after reading coinbase's rebuttal, I must say this NYT piece feels like an attempt to bully coinbase/armstrong into reverting its/his stance on engagement in issues unrelated to coinbase core mission and into submission to the cause.
If you read the rebuttal Coinbase did 3 investigations, 2 of them by external reviewers (with the doucmentation made available to the nytimes) who found no evidence in the complaints. This is a hatchet job by the woke nytimes using identity politcs to cow a company who refused to kneel.
> Let’s keep focused on building an amazing company together; we are hitting amazing new records on users, volume and revenue, and we have so much great work to do together.
Ignore any potential negativity, everything we do is great, all that matters is revenue, nothing bad ever happens hear, blah blah blah. Don't focus on the bad part, those are all lies!
The NYTimes article isn't released so I can't comment on the substance there, but this quote struck out to me, and makes me less likely to believe Coinbase.
EDIT: Adding this to clarify for later readers, apparently the above quote I took from the post has been removed from the main post.
To which muglug replied extolling the irrefutable virtue of speaking truth to power-- which is an insultingly irrelevant response to someone accusing them of being non-factual.
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