1. Steve Yegge is a smart, interesting writer.

2. The entire tech press ecosystem is utterly worthless.

Over the course of the day, the story has grown ever more encrusted with links. Each one just summarizes the original post (sometimes badly) without adding any useful analysis or commentary.

It’s baffling. I mean, If you look hard enough, you can find good crime reporting, good science reporting, and so on. So I genuinely do not understand why tech journalism rides the short bus. Particularly since there are people in my industry who are making decisions that involve large amounts of money and who would presumably benefit from having access to trenchant analysis. This seems like a market failure.

Perhaps all the good stuff is locked behind expensive, elite paywalls. Or perhaps the real action is all in the backchannel. My money’s on the latter. In any case, neither theory explains why the tech press is able to exist and perpetuate itself. Parasitism and AdSense can only take you so far.