Speaking of swinging dead cats, I can’t plow through my RSS feed without coming across someone1 linking to MG Siegler, formerly of TechCrunch and now a venture partner at CrunchFund.
And Dan Lyons, formerly Fake Steve Jobs, just posted a doozy of a post where he calls Siegler:
“Matty the Angry Chihuahua”
”…a nasty little ankle-biter who has developed some level of expertise in launching ad hominem attacks”
”…by far the biggest click-whore in all of tech blogging, a guy whose only real skill, in fact, is the kind of page-view-chasing he now derides.”
“a laughingstock who is constantly mocked by readers who regard him as a laughable troll—a mean-spirited, egomaniacal buffoon who is not very bright but thinks he’s the smartest guy in the room.”
Lyons closes with this:
This is what now passes for “journalism” in Silicon Valley: hired guns and reformed click-whores who have found a way to grab some of the loot for themselves. This is perhaps not surprising. Silicon Valley once was home to scientists and engineers — people who wanted to build things. Then it became a casino. Now it is being turned into a silicon cesspool, an upside-down world filled with spammers, liars, flippers, privacy invaders, information stealers — and their grubby cadre of paid apologists and pygmy hangers-on.
It is sort of odd for Lyons to use ad hominem attacks to degenerate Siegler for the doing the same, but his overall argument—that Siegler and Mike Arrington are complete poseurs for pretending to be journalists when they write about companies they invest in—is a pretty strong one.
Siegler and Arrington brought this Lyon’s hate down by attacking the journalists that wrote not nice things about one of their companies (the whole Path controversy).
I’m curious to see if Siegler’s acolytes come to his defense as well.
UPDATE (15 Feb):
MG Siegler responds, but spends most his post lamenting about how irrelevant Lyons is these days. That could be true, but does it make the crux of Lyons’ argument any less so?
Michael Arrington responds also. Lot’s of “I’m the victim”, both before and after stating he isn’t the victim.
And this take by Tech Vibes is quite humorous, if you are in the Lyons camp in this whole throwdown.
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Daring Fireball, DF—whose tiffs with Dan Lyons go waaaay back—again, Ben Brooks, Gruber yet again, Marco Arment, and both Marco and Shawn Blanc linking to one of Sieglar’s posts that was probably the straw that broke Lyons’ back and set him off. And that is just what Reeder still has in the last 12 days.↩