Danah Boyd, Adrian Chen, Zeynep Tufekci, Jesse Daniels (Photo: Aaron Thompson/Picasa)

National Day of Unplugging lasted from sunset on Friday, March 1 to sunset on Saturday, March 2. But judging from the smartphones, Macbooks, and tablets at the third annual Theorizing the Web conference, no attendees took them up on the challenge.

This past weekend was the first time the conference has been held in New York City, at the CUNY Graduate Center near Herald Square.

Gatherings of this sort are typically insular, academic affairs, but organizers Nathan Jurgenson and PJ Rey, both sociology grad students at the University of Maryland-College Park, have attempted to broaden the tent to include bloggers, writers, and journalists of all stripes. “We wanted to create the sort of conference we would want to attend,” said Mr. Rey.

In the opening remarks on Saturday, Mr. Jurgenson elaborated, “We would go to theory conferences, and nobody wanted to talk about the Internet." What ties the two worlds together, he added, is a concern with social justice—public intellectualism rather than institutional prestige.

(Photo: Aaron Thompson/Picasa)

Friday’s panel, “Free Speech For Whom?” was a good example of that hybrid approach.

Panelists included social media scholar Danah Boyd, a senior researcher at Microsoft Research better known as @zephoria; Gawker staff writer Adrian Chen, an editor at The New Inquiry; and University of North Carolina professor Zeynep Tufekci, a fellow at Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy. CUNY Professor Jessie Daniels, author of Cyber Racism, moderated.

Compared to the rest of the world, the panelists concurred, web companies founded in the U.S. and protected by the First Amendment are far more permissive regarding free speech. “The idea that what you do online should not affect your real life is outdated,” argued Mr. Chen.

Ms. Tufekci recalled being in Egypt and witnessing how Twitter quite literally changed what was acceptable language for people to use when discussing Hosni Mubarak. People who used Twitter and other social media were far more comfortable speaking critically of the former president even after he was overthrown than those who did not use the service.

Ms. Tufekci nonetheless qualified her enthusiasm with an awareness that the “constant affirmation of each other” in digital spaces and the “shifting of norms of what it is permissible to say” might take a darker turn. “When are we going to have a Twitter-enabled ethnic cleansing?” she wondered.

When asked what he would change about the Internet, Mr. Chen replied without hesitation, “Ban Reddit.” The crowd burst into laughter. “I’m only half joking. It’s built on bad values that I don’t respect. Hive-mindedness and misogyny are built into its infrastructure.”

Malcolm Harris, a fellow editor of Chen’s at The New Inquiry and perhaps more infamously known as that guy who pranked Occupy Wall Street, spoke Saturday on the kinds of political violence enabled by new media.

“We can tolerate structural violence but organized cadres with guns freak people out,” Mr. Harris observed. In the 21st century, character assassination is the most efficacious method of bringing down powerful people or organizations—spreading rumors and misinformation via the Internet.

Mr. Harris proposed the establishment of a “People’s Kill List,” a list of names of those who are in power who ought not to be. The list remained an abstract concept, however, as Mr. Harris refused to suggest any specific individuals or groups who should be added, even at the behest of Rachel Rosenfelt (his boss at The New Inquiry).

Ms. Rosenfelt, despite being in attendance at the panel, had submitted her question via Twitter—each of the panels had a designated hashtag for exactly this purpose. The hashtag moderator would sift through the questions and choose which would be asked, although this was not always an entirely successful strategy.

“There are a lot of comments on Twitter, but not a lot of questions,” hashtag moderator Karen Gregory told the panel on “The Facebook Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.”

Matters were complicated further around 11:30am on Saturday, when Twitter accounts with busty female avatars began flooding the conference’s main hashtag (#TtW13) with spam. “I’ve seen it happen at conferences before,” laughed Mr. Rey. “We’ll take it.”

This was not the only instance in which the technology seemed to betray its theorists: for the first 15 minutes or so of Friday’s public symposium, the panelists were forced to compete for the audience’s attention with an insistent, distracting digital buzz — the sort that computer speakers make when a nearby cell phone is about to ring.

There too the panelists sat onstage in front of a massive screen. Enormous and glaringly white, the backdrop made the panelists somewhat difficult to look at for too long at once.

“Throughout the conference, we are trying to embody the theories that we are talking about,” Mr. Rey told me on Thursday when I met up with him, Mr. Jurgenson, and a number of other participants at a bar after they had tweeted an open invitation to come have a few drinks. “This night is a microcosm of the whole weekend.”

Data serfing (Photo: Aaron Thompson/Picasa)

That may be so, but beers and conversation at a Lower East Side bar hardly prepared us for David Lyon’s keynote address, “The Emerging Culture of Surveillance: Digital Data, Visibility, and the Web.” Mr. Lyon, a sociologist, is the director of the Surveillance Studies Centre at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario.

His address offered a survey of surveillance from the medieval Eye of God to the Cold War. “There’s no point in imagining some kind of Zuckerberg-moment in 2004,” he proclaimed.

By his own admission, Mr. Lyon is not a prolific user of social media. Thus horizontal surveillance—the modern condition of everyone watching everyone else—went largely uninvestigated.

Earlier on Saturday, however, at the panel on “The Facebook Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” Jeremy Antley, an independent researcher from Portland, took steps towards bridging the gap, arguing that companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Google—what he called “data platforms”—are creating a modern version of feudalism. “We are all data serfs,” he argued. “Corporations collect vast amounts of data, even more than governments.”

We’re not unaware of this, either, Mr. Antley says. “The most appealing aspect of being a Data Serf,” he claims, “is the promise of becoming a Data Lord.”

Gizmodo's Sam Biddle sluttin' it up at CES. (Photo: Gizmodo)

News of the first annual Objectify a Male Tech Writer Day swept across the web this morning following an article penned by one of the event's founders, gaming and social media reporter Leigh Alexander. "From booth babes to harassment, snide comments to double standards, women have often had a hard time feeling comfortable around the tech industry," she wrote. In order to demonstrate "the absurdity of objectifying people you claim to agree with or support intellectually," she's encouraging female tech writers to give gendered compliments or make sexist proclamations to men about their work.

Though the actual Objectify a Male Tech Writer Day isn't until February 1st, Betabeat--comprised primarily of female writers--could hardly contain ourselves. Here are 25 gendered comments for 25 of our favorite male tech writers.

Walt Mossberg: What's a pretty face like yours doing buried in those product specs?

Mike Isaac: Shut up, honey, the women (Kara and Liz) are talking.

Ryan Tate: Started a flame war with Steve Jobs just to get some attention.

Sam Biddle: Hey baby, want a massage?

Mat Honan: It's cute how you just discovered two-step authentication last year.

David Pogue: All your scoops come from your PR girlfriend.

Michael Arrington: Swaggy? More like bitchy. Men should keep their opinions to themselves.

Steven Levy: Only wears glasses to look more authentically geeky.

John Herrman: 17 Ways John Herrman Uses His Looks to Get Ahead

Peter Kafka: You smell amazing.

Farhad Manjoo: Maybe I'd take you more seriously if your Twitter avatar wasn't so suggestive.

Anil Dash: Nag!

Peter Ha: Only a celebrated reporter because he can fill out a hoodie.

Carl Franzen: Just because it's an all-night hackathon doesn't mean you shouldn't put in a little effort.

Om Malik: He just googled some companies to look cool, he doesn’t really get tech.

Eric Eldon: We know Alexia does all the work and you were just hired as window dressing.

Ben Popper: Why are you being MEAN to STARTUPS?

Josh Topolsky: Why don't you go back to makeup reviews?

Steve Kovach: Your obsession with Snapchat proves you're a sexting slut.

Jason Del Rey: Your Twitter presence is adorable.

Nick Bilton: Maybe try an industry where you'd fit in better, like construction.

Ashlee Vance: Who'd you sleep with to get on the Techmeme leaderboard?

Bryan Goldberg: We never see you around at tech parties. You should come outttttt more.

Christopher Mims: FAKE GEEK GUY ALERT

Adrian Chen: Pretending to like Reddit so he can be the only boy in a girls' club.

Brian X. Chen: What's a nice boy like you doing at a gadget convention?

(Screengrab: Predditors)

Predditors, the Tumblr that posts the personal information of Reddit users who publish photos to the controversial subreddit Creepshots, is back up and running after a tumultuous few days. The blog was initially removed by Tumblr after administrators there mistakenly believed that the information being published was personal information. In fact, the author of Predditors is simply stringing together information available on public profiles posted by the users.

But once Tumblr put Predditors back up, its author panicked--perhaps because of the scale of the story the blog had ignited, coupled with lingering fears that she could be outed. First it was password protected, then it was taken down. Now, predditors.tumblr.com is back up, but the URL Predditors.com redirects to the original Jezebel coverage. The author appears to have individually re-uploaded each post to the Tumblr this morning.

Predditors came to prominence when Jezebel published a feature about the blog and its author, a 25-year-old female Redditor who goes by the name "Samantha." It has been at the focal point of a war between Gawker Media and Reddit, stoked by Adrian Chen's piece outing notorious Redditor Violentacrez, who was a moderator for Creepshots.

(Photo: Gawker)

Violentacrez, a notorious Reddit user who moderated controversial subreddits like Creepshots and Jailbait, was revealed by Gawker on Friday to be a Texas-based IT worker named Michael Brusch. Adrian Chen's post, "Unmasking Reddit's Violentacrez, The Biggest Troll on the Web," painstakingly detailed Mr. Brusch's dark online history--including the fact that he has created subreddits for submission of racist, sexist and borderline pedophiliac content--and served as the apex of a brewing inter-website war.

Now, Violentacrez has returned to Reddit under his "clean" handle--mbrutsch--in an attempt to explain his side of the story. In a subreddit for point and click adventure games, Mr. Brutsch surfaced, publishing an innocuous link entitled "Tea Break Escape." But comments on this link quickly turned to Mr. Brutsch and how he is dealing with the fallout from the Gawker article.

In the thread, Mr. Brutsch announced that he was fired on Saturday from his IT job, and that he is worried about being able to acquire health insurance for his sick wife. He has also begun to refer to Violentacrez in third person, perhaps in an effort to distance himself from the online persona he created. "I'm a boringly nice person IRL," he wrote.

"VA was a character I played on reddit," he added.

Mr. Brutsch also posted an extensive rebuttle to what he believes are "lies, innuendos, distortions and half-truths" in Mr. Chen's expose. Here are a handful of those explanations, with quotes from Mr. Chen's article and Mr. Brutsch's comments italicized:

"'Jailbait,' that Violentacrez had created on Reddit dedicated to sexualized images of underaged girls."

Jailbait was for pictures of attractive teens. We actually removed overtly "sexualizing" comments when we were made aware of them. SRS has had great results using the term "sexualizing" to attack my reddits. I've actually gotten emails from people wondering why people masturbated over "pics of dead kids". What kind of sick mind thinks anyone finds that sort of image "sexual"?

"Users posted snapshots of tween and teenage girls, often in bikinis and skirts."

Tweens were against the rules. People might have posted them, but we removed them as we became aware of them.

"They would say he was a child pornographer, when all he had done was spearhead the distribution of thousands of legal photos of underage girls."

He says "underage girls" to conflate pictures of high-school girls with children. Very effective.

"for someone who once created an entire subreddit dedicated to pictures of dead teenage girls (Picsofdeadjailbait)."

Actually, they were links to news articles, not pictures.

Though the expose was widely lauded among journalists, not everyone considers Mr. Chen's piece about Violentacrez an important act of journalism. Despite his actions outlined in the article, some Redditors are supportive of Mr. Brutsch. One user suggested setting up a PayPal account where Mr. Brutsch could solicit donations after losing his job.

"Just saw this. Can you establish a paypal account for anonymous contributions?" wrote one user. "I may not agree with all of your speech, but I agree with your right to say it and to troll til your heart's content. And I will send enough money to buy a decent bottle of booze."

Mr. Brutsch responded by providing his PayPal email address.

"Dude I just want to say, you are a pleasantly fucked up guy and everyone here has done completely weird, totally socially unacceptable shit on the internet. Most of us just look at porn in isolation, you have had the misfortune of getting caught being more open and forthright with your habits," wrote another user.

Reddit moderators, who are free to create and change subreddit rules as they see fit, are also still banning Gawker links as retaliation for Gawker's decision to run the piece. Today I Learned, a popular subreddit that boasts over 2 million users, announced its intention to ban all Gawker Media links, a few days after other high-profile subreddits declared the same.

Chat logs leaked to Pastebin over the weekend also revealed that moderators were actively lobbying Reddit admins to ban Gawker links site-wide. Reddit's community manager David Croach (Dacvak) initially sent out a message saying that the link to Mr. Chen's piece had been banned across the site. Reddit's general manager Erik Martin confirmed to Betabeat that this was a mistake, and the link has since been reinstated. "Mods may ban whatever they choose but that specific link is not being blocked by the site now," he said.

Despite the life-shattering repercussions spawned by his behavior online, Mr. Brutsch's faith seems unshaken.

"Everything that happens is a test from God, and how you respond to that test determines whether you pass or fail," he wrote.

Update: Mr. Brutsch announced in a Reddit comment that he has a "CNN interview scheduled for tomorrow evening." Could this be an Anderson Cooper revival?

(Photo: Says-it.com)

If websites are one big dysfunctional family, Reddit and Gawker Media are the two drunken uncles who can't stop fighting over who has to pick grandpa up at the airport. Now, the two sites are preparing for a grueling "inter-website war" that threatens to rob netizens of wifi packet rations and provide hours of popcorn-eating fodder.

After news broke on Reddit that Gawker writer Adrian Chen was preparing to publish a post revealing the personal information of Reddit user Violentacrez, a moderator of the controversial subreddit r/creepshots, Reddit began to batten down the hatches. The politics subreddit, which boasts almost 2 million subscribers, announced that it will ban all links to Gawker Media properties--including Gawker, Jezebel and Lifehacker--in response to the news that Mr. Chen may be preparing to publish personal details about Violentacruz.

According to the post:

As some of you may know, a prominent member of Reddit's community, Violentacrez, deleted his account recently. This was as a result of a 'journalist' seeking out his personal information and threatening to publish it, which would have a significant impact on his life. You can read more about it here

As moderators, we feel that this type of behavior is completely intolerable. We volunteer our time on Reddit to make it a better place for the users, and should not be harassed and threatened for that. We should all be afraid of the threat of having our personal information investigated and spread around the internet if someone disagrees with you. Reddit prides itself on having a subreddit for everything, and no matter how much anyone may disapprove of what another user subscribes to, that is never a reason to threaten them.

As a result, the moderators of /r/politics have chosen to disallow links from the Gawker network until action is taken to correct this serious lack of ethics and integrity.

It's worth noting that--despite what was incorrectly reported in Politico--this is not a statement from Reddit administrators or officials, but instead from a Reddit moderator. Reddit moderators are volunteers and do not formally represent or speak for the website.

"Moderators are free to moderate their subreddits as they see fit," Reddit's general manager Erik Martin told Betabeat by email. "They can ban all usernames that start with the letter g if they want."

"The statement is from moderators, who are volunteers," he added, while declining to elaborate on Reddit's official stance on the move.

Other subreddits are following in r/politics's stead, including r/gaming and r/SubredditDrama. r/mensrights has also joined the fight, to the surprise of absolutely no one.

Screenshots between Violentacrez and other Reddit users show that Violentacrez believed Mr. Chen was trying to publish an article about him because of his associations with creepshots, which was set to private before being banned, and r/jailbait, which Reddit admins shut down last year.

Creepshots was just banned, but new subreddits created to fill "the hole in reddit's seedy underbelly" have already begun to pop up. [Updated: Reddit has banned Creepsquad, a related subreddit.]

The feud etween Gawker and Reddit has been brewing for a while. Mr. Chen is vocal about his distaste for Reddit both on Gawker and on his own Twitter page. Last year, he was embroiled in yet more internet drama when he trolled Reddit into thinking he was behind LucidEnding, a user who faked having cancer for karma.

Recently, r/creepshots has been at the nexus of much contention between the two websites. Just yesterday, Jezebel ran a feature about the Tumblr "Predditors," run by a 25-year-old female Redditor, which publishes the personal information of those who post to the controversial subreddit.

"I think it's cute how Reddit's CreepShots apologists/Men's Right's activists/etc. think we care if they stop linking to us. And also indicative of their hypocritical obsession with privacy and control," Katie J.M. Baker, the Jezebel author behind the r/creepshots post, told Betabeat by Gchat. "It's okay for anonymous Redditors to post upskirt photo after upskirt photo, but a huge violation of privacy for a journalist to report on the men who post them? How does that make any sense? Plus, the information on Predditors (which is temporarily down) wasn't illegal--or difficult--for my source to track down."

Tumblr has since shut down Predditors. [UPDATE: Tumblr has reinstated Predditors.] A new thread on Reddit alleges that someone whose information was published on Predditors was violently attacked last night, but there is so far no substantial proof corroborating that claim.

Redditors themselves seem to be barely able to control their glee over the ensuing drama:

Now, I see before me the beginnings of an inter-website war, sparked by mass doxing, blackmail, the fall of one of reddit's legendary figures, potentially ruined lives, admins silently working in the background, and repercussions that will have devastating IRL consequences for those involved ...

I now stand before you on the precipice of the greatest shitstorm of our time. We have come far from our origins as a humble kernel, and if this escalates to the point where the entire site falls around us, I'd just like to say that it was an honor serving with you all aboard the USS Orville.

It is unclear whether Mr. Chen still intends to publish his post, rumors of which began this chilling war. For now, we can only wait as the sounds of furious keyboard clacking and the cries of rage grow ever closer to the heart of the mainstream internet.

Neil Gaiman shows off his Hugo for fans who missed out on the livestream. (Photo: Twitter)

Sorry, musicians: Unless you're already Lady Gaga, streaming services probably aren't going to net you much money. [The Next Web]

This weekend, copyright robots shut down Ustream's livestream of the Hugo Awards, just as author Neil Gaiman won for his (pretty great) Doctor Who episode. Scifi fans are not happy. [io9]

There's an app for that, and by "that" we mean war. [The Wall Street Journal]

Cambodia plans to hand the founder of The Pirate Bay over to Sweden. Unless, of course, Ecuador wants to make a habit of hiding Internet-beloved Swedes in its embassies. [Reuters]

"Meanwhile, AntiSec says it will not provide further statements or interviews until a mysterious request is fulfilled – to have a photo of a Gawker staff writer dressed in a tutu featured on the company’s homepage." [The Next Web]

(Photo: Twitter)

"The purpose of this blog is to provide sourcing for texts quoted by @Horse_ebooks and, whenever possible, provide context," wrote freelancer Jack Stuef on a freshly-minted Tumblr conceived in the bleary midnight hours early Friday morning. Born out of that insomniac haze is "The Annotated @Horse_ebooks," a blog devoted to teasing out nuance and substance from the glorious fountain of non-sequitors that is the Internet's favorite Twitter account, @Horse_ebooks.

"The idea to do a Tumblr just came to me, but I had looked up some of Horse's tweets before, and sometimes the sources of those can be just as bizarre and hilarious as the tweets themselves. Or they can be incredibly dull. I thought it was interesting," Mr. Stuef, who frequently writes for The Onion and BuzzFeed, told Betabeat via Gchat.

Since the blog has only been live for less than 12 hours, Mr. Stuef has only had time to annotate a handful of @Horse_ebooks tweets, but they're all from some pretty obscure sources. The first tweet came from a U.S. patent office report from 1987; another from a 1914 book called Photoplay.

How do you find this stuff? Do you just Google it? we wondered.

"Yeah, basically," replied Mr. Stuef. Easy enough, we suppose.

"I was considering immediately abandoning it, but the Internet seems to like it, so I guess I'll keep going until we all get sick of it," he said, presumably with a disinterested shrug. "I'll post every time Horse tweets something that's long enough to determine its source."

Of course, there are bound to be some rabid @Horse_ebooks fans angry with the project for ruining the mystery enshrouding the Internet's favorite horse. Adrian Chen's definitive account of his search for the man behind Horse did elicit some pretty angry responses, after all. ("Yes, I’m sort of ruining it," wrote Mr. Stuef in his first post to the Tumblr.)

But Mr. Stuef has a message for those wary that an annotation project of the account will destroy its novelty: "Don't read the blog, I guess?"

SkillSlate is now more like a Zaarly-esque, real-time classifieds where customers posts requests and service providers respond. Which is how the start-up nabbed a fire dancer for tonight's fete. Founder Bartek Ringwelski posted an ad on the site: "I'm throwing a party for 100+ people for our startup on Tuesday, June 26th, and I really want to invite someone different for entertainment. I'm looking for someone who is an expert sword swallower, juggler, magician or has some other amazing talent. In total, I'm looking for 10-15 minutes of you doing your talent. Please provide some background on yourself and, if possible, a video of you doing your thing," he wrote. He passed on the ventriloquist ($120), the ribbon dancer ($250), and the magician who can swallow razor blades and needles but no sword ($200).

But within 48 hours, he had a fire performer: Matthew Pagliaro, who we see is being paid $75 to do two five-minute performances with fire poi, which are flammable balls on chains. Good thing the pivot party is at the DCTV Firehouse, LOL LOL. 7:30 p.m.

TECH NEWS IS BORING. Adrian Chen's meta-post about tech blogging and how boring it is and how sleepy it makes him to read infamous Apple fanboy MG Siegler's thoughts about Facebook's iPad app--"Make it stop! This is the most boring shit ever"--and what it will look like and when it will come out is a hit! Almost 8,000 views in two hours and a pick-up from Techmeme, Dave Winer and Slate's Farhad Manjoo.

Mr. Siegler responded on Tumblr with a post titled, "Rhymes With Douchebag."

Nevermind that Chen is complaining about tech news not really being “news” while writing a story that is even less “news” in the name of pageviews. We all do that sometimes.

This was a legitimate tech story.

And it certainly wasn’t tech news about tech news about tech news about tech news.

TUMBLR PUTS THE BEASTS TO SLEEP. Tumblr has stopped using The Oatmeal's hand-drawn Tumbeasts but continues to periodically crash. "Tumblr still going down," Matt Inman writes. "Unfortunately, they stopped using the mascots I drew for them." However, Mr. Inman is giving the tumbeasts away. "A good Tumbeast should never go to waste," he declared, and is making them available for any start-up with an unstable website to download and use. Swag. We'll tell Observer.com.

MORE SKILLS YOU CAN USE. Like how to do email... There are two spots left in Dave Tisch's How to Communicate With Investors class, happening tomorrow and reprising in August. "This session will include The Basics: rules for getting the best attention for investors and customers, followed by Q&A," Mr. Tisch says. "The focus will be on emailing, social networking, basics of engagement and how to do it better." There are 44 pupils of Tisch, and the $660 goes to HackNY. Do it do it, says TechStars ex-hackstar Tal Safran. "Tisch's advice on this topic is invaluable and the proceeds will go to an amazing cause. Guaranteed to be entertaining as well." We're hoping for a question on how to use ellipses...

VC-SIGHTER. A Dennis Crowley check-in that mentioned spotting Fred Wilson while meeting with Albert Wegener and Charlie O'Donnell at The Coffee Shop just might inspire a mobile app: "Fred Wilson spotting, complete with leaderboard on most sighted places, user with the most sightings, most sighted guests he is seen with, industry vertcals of people he is meeting with the most B2B, B2C, Cloud, etc. Lol," suggested consultant Dean Collins, who yesterday heckled Dan Frommer at a panel over the blogger's unflattering view of QR codes.

FUCK FACEBOOK. Facebook is stupid.

GAWKER CONSORTS WITH HACKERS. Gawker's Adrian Chen has been tirelessly tracking the story of Lulz Security hack attacks. Mr. Chen spoke to a member of the collective via Skype, he claims, and although we're not sure how Mr. Chen would know one way or another if he was Skyping with a Lulz hacker, the quotes are amazing.

"As an arrogant and violent sociopath driven to a frenzy by the sense of my own power, I can't divulge the upcoming releases," he said. (Earlier in our chat, Topiary had brought up a March Gawker article that he said portrayed him and his crew as "arrogant sociopaths.")

After all this bluster, we asked if Topiary was worried at all about being caught. His response: "Worrying is for fools!"

MOAR TECHSTARS! The line-up of TechStars start-ups and hackers should be coming down the pike soon, but we'll just tease a few more: Add a content platform/marketplace, a closed social network, and an SMS-based queuing system in addition to the ad tech start-up, food delivery start-up and fashion start-up we teased last week.

RUMBLINGS FROM THE HACKER NEWS MACHINE. Nodejitsu could be in big trouble as Y Combinator rival Heroku rolls out its competing node.js support this week, several sources told Betabeat. The New York start-up had a headstart and benefits from its singular focus on once type of hosting, while Heroku "must balance the goals of being a curated, erosion-resistant platform against keeping pace with extremely active developer communities" in different languages. Hard not to picture the rivalry as a Japanese martial arts fight scene in the snow, arewerite?

COMPETITION. Fortune is seeking a tech writer--a certain graying newsosaur is ramping up its tech coverage--and now TechCrunchers are coming to New York? Let's get out before this thing jumps the shark.