Charlie Warzel of BuzzFeed writes about tech news site Techmeme and its influence in the tech industry.
Wurzel writes, “Hunter Walk, a former product manager at YouTube turned seed-stage venture capitalist, told me he checks the site three to five times daily. ‘It’s one of my first morning sites,’ he told me over email. ‘My perception is that lots of us [in Silicon Valley] use it.’ That includes journalists: Rivera’s taste in that day’s news often dictates what stories are followed and chased by newsrooms across the country. Without writing a word himself, Rivera is shaping tech’s story for the legion of reporters and editors tasked to tell it.
“Techmeme, then, wields tremendous power over a tremendously powerful group of people. And as its founder, Rivera has been quietly defining Silicon Valley’s narrative for the industry’s power brokers for more than a decade. But Rivera is uncomfortable — or unwilling — to reckon with how his influence has affected one of the most important and powerful industries in the world. The result is that Rivera can cast himself both as a gimlet-eyed insider with a powerful readership and as a mostly anonymous entrepreneur running a niche link blog from the comfort of his home. It’s a convenient cognitive dissonance.
“Rivera is 43 but looks a decade younger. He is sarcastic, self-deprecating, and gently neurotic. He speaks in meandering sentences that often circle back to revise themselves, and carries himself with what one person I spoke with described it as ‘an economy of movement with shifty eye contact and a lack of aggression that’s self-assured.'”
Read more here.
