Interesting Links for 21-11-2015

[andrewducker]

• Gamers trust computers too much - unless you prime them not to.
  • games computers trust
• We earn £190K a year. Should we sell a child so we can buy another flat?
  • money satire funny UK
• Biggest Diamond in More Than a Century Unearthed in Botswana
  • diamonds Africa
• Don't be embarrassed about your advantages, use them to help others.
  • money privilege

Comments

[bart_calendar]

Now that half the staff of Kotaku is going to be laid off when they for some reason merge with IO9 I wonder if the blacklist will end.

[andrewducker]

I hadn't heard about this. What's happening?

[bart_calendar]

Denton is pissed off about the union, the fact that people didn't support him when he nuked that story about the closet gay dude and that the staff accussed him of hating women.

So, he's gone on a weird witch hunt and is consolidating a ton of the sites.

There's no official list (though IO9 is confirmed dead) but if you google around at all you should be able to find posts from writers bitching and screaming that Denton fired them for no good reason.

And, honestly, it really looks like plain old sexism is why the people who got fired got fired.

John Cook, Denton's hatchet man, said anyone who didn't work for Jezebel but who wrote about "gossip" was getting fired. You can see the implication there, I suspect.

[andrewducker]

That's terrible!

I wonder if this is death throes for the whole organisation.

[bart_calendar]

That's the open question.

Though what it looks like is Denton wants fewer sites so he can get more advertising page views per site and wants each site more speciazlied for more targeted advertisting.

For example, Jezebel is going to be only gossip and fashion after Dec. 1 - because the ad people said they'd pay more if there was just gossip and fashion there.

Meanwhile Gawker is going to become a strickly political site after Jan. 1 and start taking ads from candidates.

I'm not sure what market the IO9/Kotaku fusion site will be after but I'm sure it will also be super advertiser targeted.