Jason Calacanis discovers that Fark has been selling story placement on their front page and calls them on it, getting a priceless quote from Fark management in the process:
I don’t think that either Drew or I are willing to engage in a discussion regarding the business ethics of our decision
However, if you look at any news source, they are influenced by PR agencies, wine & dine’s and similar events. Take a look at the Graydon Carter as example #1. I challenge you to find a pure editorial voice in news today.
I assume what the Fark rep means is “Everyone who takes money to publish sells their independence”, itself an arguable assertion, but even if that were true, you’d think anyone publishing on the Web would have noticed the arrival of, oh, 4 or 5 million non-commercial sites in the last few years, no?
Worse, they talk a good game about the inevitability of money-for-links, but they sure never bothered to let their readers in on it.
On a related note (cluelessness among people trying to manipulate social media being our grand theme here), I got mail from someone asking if I would be interested in talking to company X, who makes a revolutionary firewall and dessert topping? Normally I delete stupid PR mail like that the minute I see it, but I’d gotten mail from this source a couple of times recently, so I hit reply to ask to be taken off his list, and his email address was PayPerClipPR.com.
I really couldn’t believe it — here was a PR person writing to ask me to do a story on his company (which I have never done in ten years of writing about the net), and his email address announced that his compensation was directly tied to the number of clips he could get run on behalf of his client. The unstable stance of asking a favor while broadcasting contempt left me a little disoriented.
If three is the official number to declare a trend, I say Fark, PayPerClipPR.com and Change This (bonus meme accelerator: Friendster sells character placement from the movie Anchorman) mean that the Game Social Media for Extractive Value pattern, already bad with comment spam, is going to get much worse.
1. Marc Canter on August 3, 2004 2:28 AM writes...
You tell um brother.
These people are slime - clearly VC funded and motivated by only thing - money.
They'll probably vote Republican.
But if they meet me in an alley - they'd better run. Gotta use this body weight somehow.
Permalink to Comment2. Scott Rafer on August 3, 2004 3:00 AM writes...
Pay-for-placement is not a new issue in the search world. I see this as a similar issue. Simply put, how do you present paid-for commercial information as profitably as possible without fooling your users as to which are "organic results" and which are sponsored? Now that search and social media are hybridizing (feedster, eurekster, etc.), pay-for-placement issues are again arising.
I put the Anchorman promotion on Friendster in a vastly different category than the headlines on Fark. The existence of Fakesters (which movie characters obviously are) is known to many if not most Friendster users. Friendster inventing authentic hipsters to pass product pitches and artificially generating friend relationships for them would be a different thing. At Feedster, we are increasingly giving publishers the ability to control the look of their content in our engine (http://about.feedster.com/boingboing), however they do not get any control over whether their results appear in the search results. As usual, and as brought up above, disclosure of methods and practices is everything. Many of those practices are bound to be controversial, no matter how well disclosed.
Permalink to Comment3. Greg Lastowka on August 3, 2004 6:06 AM writes...
Good catch, Clay.
I've been following search engine relevancy bias as a matter of legal regulation for a while now, so it's interesting to see A-List blogs reach a level where monetary influence over supposed neutrality can be an issue.
A few links on the search engine topic:
http://searchenginewatch.com/sereport/article.php/2164891
http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1073944815739
http://www.chaihana.com/se4.pdf
Obviously, we're not talking about legal regulation in the case of A-List blogs, but it's curious to see social norms step into the dynamic and say that this type of thing feels fraudulent and so bloggers will be shunned if they sell their voices.
Curious too that (it seems) reputational capital can be openly bartered whereas monetary capital is off limits -- but I guess that's often true.
Permalink to Comment4. Anon E. Muss on August 3, 2004 1:58 PM writes...
And apparently, they're removing any mention of this from their own, user-submission-powered site.
And that "hush" is a big part of the anger that some farkers feel, isn't it? It doesn't pass the smell test if you don't want to come clean about it. Sure, it's a business - shill all you want- but even the magazines that do "Special Sections" plaster the words "Special Advertising Section" across the top of all pertinient pages. The content may look the same as the rest of the magazine, but you are being told they're pimping a product.
I mean, fark was a barometer of sorts, to see what people were looking at on the web, to see what the hot topics of the day were, to place your comments on those events. Now, to know that the links available for comment are not based on newsworthiness or humor of the headline, but that any link you look at is potenitally placed using cash... well, any respectability and/or integrity that it did have is gone.
Permalink to Comment5. Michael Tippett on August 3, 2004 4:59 PM writes...
This is going to do them a lot of damage. Even worse than the fact that they're selling their editorial is how cheap they're willing to let it go for. $300 a story - that's less than it costs to put out a press release. If you're going to blow up your reputation you might as well try and make few bucks along the way.
Michael,
Permalink to CommentBlueHereNow.com
6. Ben Hyde on August 3, 2004 5:13 PM writes...
Fake farker revealed as claque!
Permalink to Comment------
This comment brought to you by: http://del.icio.us/tag/forClay
7. Cosmic_Music on August 4, 2004 6:22 PM writes...
You delete my comment and you have the nerve to complain about Fark? You lose.
Fore!
Permalink to Comment8. Clay Shirky on August 4, 2004 8:28 PM writes...
Welcome back, Cosmic. Sorry for the deletion, but I wanted to get your attention.
Your comment read I think I can speak for the Total Fark community when I say that your article means nothing to us. If "selling" links on the main Fark page keeps our TotalFark membership fees down, then who cares?
If you really want to understand what Fark is about, cough up $5 and come into the REAL Fark community.
I wanted to test that assertion -- that this writing meant nothing to you or the rest of the Total Farkers -- by seeing if you were watching the site afterwards, and as your follow-on post indicates, you were.
Coming here, posting, and then checking back to see the reaction is behavior that indicates a level of emotional investment in the issue not exactly compatible with your assumed stance of "who cares?"
I know you don't like to see Fark criticized, but the rhetorical effect of hanging around to tell us how unimportant you find all this is (how to put this most delicately?) sub-optimal.
Permalink to Comment9. Cosmic_Music on August 5, 2004 1:38 AM writes...
Thank you for your response. In fact that was someone else's comment, but I agree with the sentiment.
I'm unconcerned with rhetorical effect. You missed the point. It was a joke. Pretty much everything posted on fark is intended as a joke.
I cam back here not to check your reaction, but to check if any of my fellow farkers had posted anything amusing.
Fark is a fun place to amuse yourself on the internet. It isn't 'the website of record,' unless you have a burning desire to record hippopotamus attacks in Poland, for example. Which is why no-one cares about this, assuming it's true. It's irrelevant to the point and purpose for which i pony up my five bucks every month.
Deleting the comments was chickenshit whichever way you justify it.
Take care, and goodbye forever. The last word will be yours. Enjoy.
Permalink to Comment10. tom on August 5, 2004 3:15 AM writes...
I don't understand what the big deal is. People are acting like this is some deep dark horrible secret.
Permalink to CommentFark has always (for as long as I can remember) had a link on the right side of the page: "View all classifieds (and boobies and weeners) currently in rotation" I've always interpreted it as meaning that those are the links that people paid to have listed. I can not be the only one who saw that link, so why the sudden outrage?
11. Clay Shirky on August 5, 2004 2:58 PM writes...
Cosmic, it obviously wasn't a joke -- it was your attempt to have the last word, something you've failed at by returning repeatedly.
And sorry I mis-attributed you -- your delightful oxymoron of 'scathing indifference' illustrates your dilemma perfectly. There is of course no such thing as scathing indifference; you continue to expend energy to demonstrate how little energy is worth expending on this, and each response weakens your purported disengagement.
As for being chickenshit, yes of course. I knew when I deleted a comment that I was violating a social norm, but I did it to check your view of double-standards, as this is behavior Drew engages in as well. (Manipulative, yes, but effective.) I wanted to see if you would whine about behavior here you were defending elsewhere, which, of course, you did.
And as for goodbye forever, I'm sorry to see you go. It's rare to get a troll to come back to complain about not getting the reaction he wanted, and I was hoping to continue the conversation.
Permalink to Comment12. Clay Shirky on August 5, 2004 3:08 PM writes...
Tom, I think you answer the question for yourself. When you say "I've always interpreted it as meaning..." you're saying you had to figure it out for yourself, and got no confirmation from the site itself.
It appears, from the number of comments on Jason's original post, that many users hadn't made the same connection you had, and it's apparent from the lack of clear labeling on Fark (and, more recently, their deletion of pointers to commentary on the issue) that Drew was and is in no hurry to make it easy to separate the ads from the user-submitted content.
Now, it's easy to argue that the users should have known, but that's a different issue. For whatever reason, they didn't know, and instead of figuring it out one at a time, as you did, Jason's post has caused a number of them to figure it out all at once.
Permalink to Comment13. Allen Voivod on August 8, 2004 9:05 PM writes...
Two points to mention:
1. Regarding "Anon E. Muss" commenting on the removal, why would Fark link to Calacanis when Calacanis is bashing Fark, regardless of whether the claim has merit? Put another way, neither WhiteHouse.gov nor JohnKerry.com link to DeadBrain.com, and we bash them routinely. Makes perfect sense to me.
2. Our site has received main page placement on Fark twice in the last two months without paying anything for it. Neither our site, nor any of the other satire sites with which we're familiar, have been asked to pay for placement, ever. Just FYI.
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