>rather than taking [Redditors'] skepticism seriously, many media outlets pounced instead on the story of their “rage,” scouring the site for examples of death threats, violence, or outright lunacy, which were then published with much fanfare.
We are still learning how to live in a connected and recorded world. Even the most coherent natural conversations, when put on paper, make for strained reading. The thread of thought jerks around implications and exclamations of hyperbole. Cherry-picking hiccups is a thoughtless exercise in missing the forest for the trees.
We lived in a connected world before. Small town talk connected communities. The chatter then was likely as belligerent as Twitter is today. The difference, though, is gossip is (usually) ephemeral while written words persist. Society didn't seek to document and re-broadcast the petty thoughts of suburban Geneva on the loucheness of New Yorkers. If something was to cross the Atlantic, it would have to carry more substance.
Perhaps it will take a new generation of reporters to effect the change. One more enamoured by, and driven to explore, the message versus the medium.
"We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate…. As if the main object were to talk fast and not to talk sensibly. We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough."
I know you've clarified your view below, but there are plenty of people who I know only by their online nickname. Stage names are accepted as normal and no one bats an eyelid - Reginald Dwight is a great example of this. There are plenty around however.
I can't get over the fact people keep printing articles without adding anything to the mix.
Assuming the Satoshi Nakamoto identified is not the Satoshi Nakamoto who invented bitcoin, you'd think they'd try and get some formal writing with an FOI request or something to solidify the writing analysis instead of relying on postings to model train forums.
I'm a mod on a few reasonably sized reddit subs, and yea, i would have no idea who anyone was by their real name. We are living in a transitional time for media to say the least. I wouldn't be surprised if media, by which i mean reporting style, 50 years from now barely resembles the old guard of today.
I'm a little surprised that the New Yorker (although this is a New Yorker blog, so maybe it's not the "real" New Yorker) is doing the HuffPo/Gawker/Buzzfeed kind of "look what just happened on Reddit!" type of post.
However, as a former reporter, I can understand the temptation of looking at reddit as a treasure trove of quotes and opinions that require no more than a few clicks to use in an article.
Interesting that the writer seems to take what is described as "rage" (a meme reference) and "sound and fury" (idiomatic) literally. Other than that, this is rather a tardy and something less than nuanced summary of the events of the last week or so. Kind of strange - I thought the magazine was working to modernize its tech coverage.
New Yorkers coverage is always kinda meh. Like, why quote random reddit users? They could've quoted Gavin, Eric, Andreas etc. Also, that's a lot of words in that article to say the bitcoin subreddit went apeshit over Newsweek.
I think it useful for the writers relationship with their audience to treat the online thing at arms length. It doesn't make the piece more interesting, but it helps accomplish the writers goal of getting it read.
I don't know how often I have actually seen this, but it was interesting to note that the references to Newsweek were simply italics instead of hyperlinks. After recently studying pagerank I found that an interesting tactic, whether or now pure hyperlinks are stil used in the calculations vs some other metric.
That article is explicitly linked in the current article (see "Joshua Davis wrote about the search for Nakamoto in 2011"). If they were "trying to play dumb", they probably would not have mentioned it.
it took them 5 days to publish an article regarding it though and the fact that Newsweek was able to get a lead so quick (not saying it's the right guy) seems they like didn't do due diligence in the first place, I asked the author of The New Yorker piece for comment on the recent developments.
I hope, for this man's sake and for the reporter too, that this story's evaporation of its shelf life is expiring.
It just feels like something that belongs in those trashy grocery store gossip magazines, meanwhile we're the rubberneckers causing some sort of metaphorical traffic jam.
During the early-2000's there was an online location (being deliberately vague here) where there was an individual who was very excited about the idea of decentralised accounting.
At the time most people ignored everything that author was saying. Now, his comments seem strangely prescient.
That authors writing seems somewhat similar to Satoshi's, too.
Additionally at least one domain name that author had control over is a Japanese site (although it looks to be pretty spammy, and not Bitcoin related).
OTOH, there was little evidence that I saw that this person had the necessary skills to create Bitcoin.
Sorry, this is way too vague to be worth of anything. After all, a lot of the cypherpunks movement was in love with decentralized money, but only one gal, guy or group made something usable out of this.
I'm not trying to imply that I know who Satoshi is. More that I have a hypothesis, and I'm not really too sure how to test it.
I'm not entirely sure that I would/should/could investigate it further anyway. Satoshi seems to value his or her privacy, and even if anyone had information that could piece that shield I'm not sure they should.
But meh.. like you say. I'm probably wrong anyway. OTOH.. how would someone verify something like this? As far as I can see there is no compelling way to do it, without Satoshi deciding to unmask themselves.
I'd say this sounds like a case of "Idea whose time has come". Sometimes, the flow of culture and technology creates a situation in which certain ideas keep bubbling up. Might be that decentralized accounting is one of those ideas in this day and age.
I mean, there are a bunch of ideas that half of us have had at one point or another, independently. Decentralized refrigeration boxes for grocery-to-the-home delivery is also one of those ideas, autonomically interacting vehicle computers is another.
In this topic, a mainstream media publication treats a loosely coupled online group of millions of disparate people as if they were a monolithic entity.
We are still learning how to live in a connected and recorded world. Even the most coherent natural conversations, when put on paper, make for strained reading. The thread of thought jerks around implications and exclamations of hyperbole. Cherry-picking hiccups is a thoughtless exercise in missing the forest for the trees.
We lived in a connected world before. Small town talk connected communities. The chatter then was likely as belligerent as Twitter is today. The difference, though, is gossip is (usually) ephemeral while written words persist. Society didn't seek to document and re-broadcast the petty thoughts of suburban Geneva on the loucheness of New Yorkers. If something was to cross the Atlantic, it would have to carry more substance.
Perhaps it will take a new generation of reporters to effect the change. One more enamoured by, and driven to explore, the message versus the medium.