NiemanLab: Protocol — think Politico, but for tech — launches into a crowded space. “Uber, but for petsitters. Airbnb, but for barns. Sofi, but for gamblers. Lime, but for unicycles. Squarespace, but for birthday cards. Casper, but for pillows. That Silicon Valley DNA is alive and well in Protocol, the anticipated news site that launched today, and which frames itself as: Politico, but for tech.”
The New Yorker: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News. “People have been trying to outsmart one another on Internet forums for as long as there have been Internet forums. Still, Hacker News has an unusually wide influence. Landing a blog post or personal project on the front page is a badge of honor for many technologists, and the site has become a regional export: ninety per cent of its traffic comes from outside the Bay Area, and a third of its users are in Europe. The site is now a portal to tech culture for millions of people. At the same time, it has become a punch line and a punching bag for tech workers and engineers who see it as a locus of hubris, myopia, and exclusivity. A word that comes up frequently among its critics is ‘toxic.’”
TechCrunch: Get the latest TC stories read to you over the phone with BrailleVoice. “For the visually impaired, there are lots of accessibility options if you want to browse the web — screen readers, podcast versions of articles and so on. But it can still be a pain to keep up with your favorite publications the way sighted app users do. BrailleVoice is a project that puts the news in a touch-tone phone interface, reading you the latest news from your favorite publications (like this one) easily from anywhere you get a signal.”
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