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Are articles that pull cheap punches & empty-headed loudmouths on Twitter a good metric for what's actually popular, though?

• wutbrodo 9y ago
  Having been inside places like Google: yes, in the ways that are relevant. These people may not have as much effect on (e.g.) national elections, because they don't have nearly as much influence. But for places like Google, their press coverage and employees/candidate pools are disproportionately affected by said loudmouths. Again, anyone who's paying attention can't but have noticed that corporations have had to bow to demands from these lunatics.
  • tambienben 9y ago
    I guess you have observed the reasons for this firsthand, then. I was left guessing at incentives for those at the helm of said companies.
    • wutbrodo 9y ago
      You don't need much inside knowledge to see this in action: the ability of a trending topic to change corporate behavior has been established for years at this point. And as I said, for tech, this problem is particularly bad. For a very recent example, consider the Damore memo as a recent example. Leaving aside what action you think should have been taken (_really_ not interested in that discussion right now), there was a marked shift in Google's reaction to the memo once it hit the idiots of the twitterati and blew up. PR matters to companies.