(Photo: Business Insider)

Twitter attempted to have a conversation about race and the tech industry yesterday. The loudest voices?  White men on either side of the argument shouting each other down. What got obscured along the way was just how much pattern-matching plays into the lack of diversity in the tech industry and the people who cover it and how that holds all of us back.

They almost made Jamelle Bouie’s point for him.

In a feature for The Magazine, Mr. Bouie examined why the mastheads of tech blogs like The Next Web, The Verge, Engadget and Gizmodo were overwhelmingly white and male. Rather than “overt racism,” he found a prohibitive combination of dependence on unpaid internships--and the network effect of a wired boys club whose members sometimes seem to be talking solely for each other's benefit.

Technology has become just as pervasive as the Valley had always hoped, Mr. Bouie noted:

Gadgets are used by everyone. African Americans and Latinos, for example, are huge Internet users. They use Twitter and Facebook at higher rates than whites, they’re the most likely to use their cell phones for Internet usage, and the cell phones they buy are — for the most part — smartphones.

But so many of its gatekeepers are cut from the same cloth, limiting “aspects of their perspective.”

(For the purposes of his argument, Mr. Bouie focused on African-American and Latino writers: "In no way does this discount the real problems of access and representation for Asian Americans, but compared to African Americans and Latinos, they have much more representation in technology journalism." It's an important distinction. "Who Has It Worse," has to be the most divisive game ever marketed to minorities. But we all know there is a difference. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying to themselves or doesn’t spend much time at tech events.)

I've never been discriminated against as a tech reporter because I’m Indian. At least I don't think I have. It's impossible to say, really, because there are a number of other factors that make me counter-to-type for a tech blogger. In addition to not being white, I’m not a dude and I didn't come from a family that had any interest in technology or media. It wasn't until I was 26 that a small J-school scholarship, student loans, and a semi-patient live-in boyfriend helped balance the cost of living in New York City with the limited income of a low-paying magazine internship.

The problem with identifying racism is that it seldom happens in isolation. Often it’s a confluence of factors that inspire people to see you as enough of an "other" to underestimate you, ignore you, deny you access, or simply not want to help.

Silicon Valley, however, does not respond well when its virtue is called into question. Unlike Wall Street, say, the tech industry cares what you think of it. It wants to be seen as a bootstrapped meritocracy--until the VC check arrives--open to all exceptional individuals and beholden to nothing but the disruptive tide of innovation ushered in by its gadgets, services and apps.

To imply otherwise is to call into question the hustle--the defensive posture of a “crush it” culture, which helps obscure both self-doubt and the fact that success can be capricious.

Mr. Bouie’s essay followed a similar line of reasoning to the one we've heard about the lack of black and Latino entrepreneurs and investors. ("I don't know a single black entrepreneur," Michael Arrington told CNN in 2011 before recanting his statement, claiming it caught him off guard.) Substitute "inability to find funding" for "unpaid internships," but the network effects and pattern-matching stays the same. Mark Zuckerberg becomes a billionaire and suddenly Ben Horowitz feels comfortable crowing that Andreessen Horowitz "likes to invest in college dropouts with insane ideas going after tiny markets with no way to monetize."

Another recent discussion, this one about sexism faced by women working in gaming, devolved into making fun of male tech writers somehow. Trust me, male tech reporters do not need any more attention. There is already an entire phalanx of marketing and PR professionals--by and large capable women--who make them feel special. That whole dance is about as gendered as a Budweiser commercial.

Still, why is there so much attention being paid to the people covering tech when the industry itself faces very real race and gender gaps? As Melissa Gira Grant recently wrote about girl geeks vs. boys kings, “the unpaid and underpaid labor of women is essential to making that machine go, to making it so irresistible.” Besides a touch of solipsism, it’s likely because the media has such entrenched discrimination problems of its own. It’s not just tech bloggers who are mostly white men. In 2006, The Observer looked at the magazine world’s vanilla ceiling. No one could believably argue that much has changed.

It’s a pity that the conversation around Mr. Bouie’s article degenerated into piling on his most easily dismissed detractor, Jason Calacanis. In the same breath that he invoked the emergence of post-race society, Mr. Calacanis assigned a percentage of Korean-ness to his daughter's face. Imagine being that child and then let's all move on.

Perhaps a better way to encourage more diversity in tech reporting is to look at why diversity is important. As Mr. Bouie noted, the homogeneity of voices has lead tech writers to sleep on Pinterest’s popularity with women and dismiss concerns about how App.net might lead to white flight because of the Twitter competitor’s $50 fee.

What’s more, the proliferation of apps, gadgets and services--coupled with the metastasization of the often complacent tech press--has amplified the noise-to-signal ratio.

A report last month claimed that of the 430,000 odd apps that will debut in the iOS App Store this year, most will go unnoticed. Gatekeepers can influence which products get attention and adoption, which in turn can affect funding.

Venture capital firms sometimes talk about pattern matching, the act of identifying traits of successful entrepreneurs and companies in order to replicate their wins. Even an industry that prides itself on innovating, it seems, actively seeks to propagate the status quo.

That might also be the reason why, when we read about how black people use Twitter, it's so rarely from their own perspective.

Thus far none of the posts related to this week’s controversy have shown up on Techmeme, so no points on the leaderboard for trying to talk about race. And the biggest beneficiary to all the ink spilled might be Marco Arment, the bomb-throwing developer behind The Magazine. Here’s hoping that changes.

Screengrab

App.net has generously created a $5 per month plan and lopped $14 off its yearly membership fee. That means people with $36 to spare on a Twitter lookalike can now snag their very own App.net handle and bragging rights to spending $36. Or $60, if you opt for the $5 monthly plan.

As The Next Web notes, members who ponied up the original (and infamous) $50 yearly fee won't receive a refund, just extra months on their current plan.

In a blog post announcing the changes, App.net founder Dalton Caldwell explained that since App.net is nearing "the 20,000 user level" after predicating the original pricing model on just 10,000 users, such "momentum and scale" justified the updates to price structure.

"Our stated goal for hitting a 'critical mass' was 10,000 paying members," Mr. Caldwell wrote, "Fortunately, the market has told us 'yes', and then some."

At the end of his post Mr. Caldwell concluded:

We fundamentally believe that 3rd-party developers will innovate faster, create better applications on more platforms, and make more users happy than any single company could. As the platform matures, and the community and app selection grows, we believe that the value and appeal of App.net can only increase. Remember: we are just getting started.

App.net has been criticized as a "country club" and called evidence of "white flight" from Facebook and other social networks. It has also been called "the worst," by me, just now.

(Photo: Github)

They Alley may think it's got somethin' on the Valley, but in California it's now illegal for employers and universities to solicit your social media passwords. Damn hippies. [The Atlantic]

Speaking of California, General Assembly partnered with LaunchPad LA to open a branch in Los Angeles. [PandoDaily]

Google faked an address in its "iLost" Motorola commercial to make Apple Maps look bad. Come on, guys. You don't need to lie to make Apple Maps seem unusable. [AppleInsider]

App.net is giving out $20,000 per month to developers that already have $50. Sigh. [App.net]

Kittydar uses Javascript to detect cats in photos. Sadly, when we uploaded a picture of our cat hanging out in our fridge's crisper drawer, it could not locate him. :( [Github]

Mr. Lovingood (Photo: Bravo TV)

You didn't think we'd forgotten, did you? It's Friday afternoon, which means it's Rumor Roundup time!

One Day You're In, Next Day You're Out Randi Zuckerberg's Bravo reality show finally has a (disappointly un-innovative) name--"Silicon Valley Start-Ups"--although we assume the shenanigans will make up for it. According to a press release, the hour-long show will premiere Monday November 5th at 10 p.m. EST, so set your DVRs or prep your voodoo dolls, depending.

This part got left out of the release, but we hear the show will launch sans two reported cast members: Marcus Lovingood and Jay Holanda, although both gentleman will appear as sub-characters.

If you've been wondering why you're seeing so many LOLCats on Bravo in between the screeching ladies of leisure--Did Andy Cohen just discover there's an Internet beyond Twitter??--the press release also mentions the premiere of LOLwork, set at the ICanHasCheezburger.com offices and due to test whether the Cat Pics = Traffic formula works as well on TV.

Speaking of screeching--in this case, Bravo has Sarah Lacy's approval.

@benhuh congrats! are you beating the shit silicon valley show to market?

— Sarah Lacy (@sarahcuda) September 20, 2012

Fine Young Cannibals On his mirco-blog, Tumblr editor-in-chief Chris Mohney revealed that the entire office, excluding him, started a juice cleanse today.

Not your correspondent of course as I’m a lost cause cleansewise, but whoever of that persuasion survives the weekend will show up monday morning crazed and belligerent, shot through with explosive episodes of the whooping dropsy. Next week should be interesting expexially when you factor in Yom Kippur’s nutritional denial, so let’s peg it at 72% chance of autocannibalism by Wednesday and that’s Nat Daddy’s official projection on the subject going into the otherwise temperate weekend, drive carefully now.

If this counts as a thinspo post, we are so reporting you to Tumblr!

Cyber-Bullying Who's giving startups a hard time? That's what we want to know, as per this opaque, exasperated tweet from Texts From Last Night founder Lauren Leto, who shut down Bnters and took on the general manager role at Findings, a Betaworks startup, in May:

A certain 'influencer, curator' lady needs to stop being a bully to small start ups. Go create a company yourself.

— Lauren Leto (@laurenleto) September 19, 2012

Based on another recent tweet, however, one of Ms. Leto's followers did a little process of elimination.

@laurenleto so i guess she's not the "innovator, curator" you mention earlier ;)

— christy purington (@cpurington) September 19, 2012

Having perused Ms. Leto's winsome new book, Judging a Book By Its Lover, we are sorry to report it does not contain the answer to this particular mystery.

The Reality Distortion Field Reaches Los Angeles Even the youngest Kardashian kares about keeping up with technology.

Reverse-Reverse Sexism Still wondering what $50 and an App.net membership will get you (besides a word cloud of Twitter references)? Well, former GroupMe employee Matt Langer reports that the social network is "where you go to bro down with your /r/MensRights bros," like Favstar founder Tim Haines. However, no one with $50 has agreed to support Mr. Haines' cause.

Wedding bells On the mergers front, we hear that serial cofounder and investor Zack Klein recently married girlfriend Courtney Lewis, a partner at Hard Candy Shell. The pair booked "all of Aurora" earlier this week and issued an open invite via Twitter, in order to celebrate in style. To make everything ultra-official, the new Mrs. Klein has even rechristened her Twitter handle. Much luck and many Goodfellas-style envelopes of cash to the two lovebirds.

As always: Overheard a juicy tidbit about impending departures or imminent acquisitions? Dying to dish about startup blunders or frothy financing? Holler at your girls: tips@betabeat.com

(Photo: App.net wordcloud by Diego Basch)

App.net, the private social network spearheaded by Valleyite Dalton Caldwell, recently raised $600,000 from the tech community in order to build an "ad-free Twitter alternative." To keep out the riffraff, App.net charges $50 for subscribers and $100 for developers in order to join the elite handful of people active on the site.

Yesterday, developer Diego Basch published some stats scraped from his first month on App.net. A lot of the findings are unsurprising, given App.net's origins, but interesting nonetheless:

There are about 20k users, and a little over 300k posts so far. For those who haven’t checked out the service, a post is similar to a tweet only up to 256 characters in length instead of 140....

250 users have generated half of the posts. This is the core group of early fans/evangelists. I’m one of them, at #62 the last time I checked....

A high percentage of appnet’s users are developers.

If 250 of the 20,000 users are generating half the posts, that means half the posts are only generated by 1.25 percent of people. Talk about power users.

Mr. Basch also created a word cloud that aggregates App.net's most used words every hour. When we clicked to check it out, the biggest word on the cloud was "TWITTER." Turns out the people on the anti-Twitter still really love talking about Twitter. The difference? The people on App.net have $50.

Medium (Screengrab)

BuzzFeed's FWD tech blog has stepped forward to answer one of the most burning questions of our time: where do you find white guys on the Internet? As a service to the caucasian XY-deprived populace, FWD focuses its survey on three somewhat similar bloggy or social networking-related start-ups: Svbtle, Medium and App.net:

How white and male is the early-adopter crowd? As it turns out, quite. White males make up 81 percent of the users at Svbtle, 88 percent of users at App.net, and 61 percent of users at Medium. It appears that Medium is somewhat more diverse than the other two platforms. It's important to note, however, that Medium is the youngest of the three, and has the smallest pool of beta users as well, so the data is less statistically significant.

Contributor Benjamin Jackson writes that the data confirms "the stereotype of the white male-dominated tech industry" and that first adopters of sites like App.net are indeed "often influential [...] tech leaders based in and around New York and the Bay Area."

We kid, but the survey makes striking point about techie concentrations of dudes with--as FWD defines it--"a visibly white complexion." Or, in the case of App.net, men with visibly white complexions and $50.

(Photo: Ihave50dollars.com)

Much has been written about Valley celeb Dalton Caldwell and his rather notorious new social network, App.net. The Twitter-like site charges $50 to join, in an effort to weed out spammers and people who aren't really dedicated to the integrity of the community.

BuzzFeed wondered if the walled garden of App.net signaled the beginning of "white flight" from more inclusive sites. Venturebeat called Mr. Caldwell a "betrayed entrepreneur" crusading against Facebook and Twitter. But perhaps the most scathing critique comes from Ihave50dollars.com, a site built to look exactly like App.net that satirizes the fact that App.net is basically a social network for people with an extra $50 laying around.

"We're building a real-time social service where users who have $50 and developers who have $100 come get to tell people that they have $50 or $100, respectively," reads the site. For the "I have $50" member tier, you get a full year of telling people you have $50. For $100, you get the developer tier, which comes with a widget to embed on your blog that tells people you have $50.

The satirical site even mirrors the testimonials of the real App.net. "Like all of the other smart people (who have $50), I backed IHave50Dollars.com," it quotes Instapaper creator Marco Arment as saying. "I'd like to see IHave50Dollars.com succeed. A realtime social feed for telling people I have $50 is worth real earth dollars to me," says a Firefox engineer.

If you attempt to sign up, you're directed to a page with a TED talk about slavery, and asked the pointed (but vaguely preachy) question, "You know who really needs $50?" Touche.

According to WhoIs records, Ihave50dollars.com was registered two days ago by Max Spiker of Superhuman Ventures, LLC, a Sarasota, Florida-based company, and a writer of the blog DMAD.com. We've reached out to Mr. Spiker to confirm it's his site.

In the meantime, we'll just be sitting here wishing we had $50.

Update: Mr. Spiker confirmed to Betabeat that he's the mastermind behind the site. "After I stepped back from the herd mentality that was making app.net so popular I found it kind of absurd," he wrote in an email. "I thought I'd have some fun and put a mirror up to it. I'm glad others got the joke. Then I thought I'd use the opportunity to point attention to something that I wish got more attention, resources, and brainpower than it currently does - from people who obviously have an extra $50 lying around."