Arrington. (Photo via Flickr.)

Update, 4/8/13: Michael Arrington has responded with a denial of all allegations, and his ex, Meghan Asha, has issued her own denial of the allegations  "made on [her] behalf." More here. 

On Monday, TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington's ex-girlfriend publicly accused him of physical abuse and followed up with accusations of rape. As yet, there's absolutely no proof of Ms. Allen's dark allegations. But today, two men Mr. Arrington once called friends have publicly denounced him.

This is getting very, very ugly--not that it was a pretty business to begin with.

The first long testimonial comes from Jason Calacanis who, admittedly, has been bitching publicly about Michael Arrington for years, ever since their friendship disintegrated over the TechCrunch 50 conference. (They're basically the Kenya Moore and Phaedra Parks of Silicon Valley.)

On his Facebook page today, he threw his weight behind Ms. Allen's accusations (without once naming Mr. Arrington specifically, thought it's very clear who he's talking about):

Then story after horrific story of unimaginable behavior were told to me in private and I said nothing. Just stayed focused on my work.

Now all those stories are coming out publicly and there is no victory for anyone involved. Seeing the bully finally meet his demise is just sad. I wish I could have gotten through to the person who was, for a time, one of my favorite people.

Nor is Mr. Calacanis the only ex-friend publicly denouncing Mr. Arrington. Gawker reports that another onetime pal, blogger Loren Feldman (a polarizing figure in his own right), has come out against the man with a YouTube video, in which he announces:  "Let me tell you this: I think he did it."

He calls the allegations "the worst kept rumor in the Valley for years." He claims he cut Arrington out of his life specifically because of the rumors, and tries to shame the tech world for keeping the matter quiet when we're supposed to be living in an age of radical transparency. "One of the biggest tech luminaries is accused of something like this and no one will even talk about it."

He's right. Mr. Feldman and Mr. Calancis are both controversy-courting figures in the tech industry, in addition to being former friends. Despite "liking" Mr. Calacanis' Facebook post, most insiders haven't said a word, at least not in public. In the comment thread on Facebook, Robert Scoble brings up the issues of defamation, although Mr. Arrington's stature and legendary reputation as a bully obviously play a part.

“That said," Mr. Scoble adds, "believe me, EVERYONE is talking about these charges behind private doors in Silicon Valley. I’m sure the charges are being looked into.”

(Photo: theybf.com)

Real Genius Andreessen Horowitz invested $15 million in Rap Genius to help its Ivy League cofounders to annotate the Internet. But how much will they have to pay to rein in the braggadocious Mahbod Moghadam?

In a recent issue of Wakefield, a newsletter covering "tech and startup insight not captured elsewhere," Maboo was up to his old shenanigans, volunteering information about a “feud” with Mark Zuckerberg, who also happens to be backed by Andreessen Horowitz.

Apparently, Mr. Moghadam was at Ben Horowitz’s home, “chilling” with Zuck and Nas as is the new mode of Silicon Valley socializing. (Mr. Horowitz happens to be close friends with Steve Stoute, Nas’ former manager.) Despite Zuck's heightened privacy concerns (it's complicated?) Rap Genius cofounder couldn't resist Instagramming his good fortune.

Apparently Zuck never leaves his house because he’s so afraid of people photographing him, and then our investor – his house is one of the only places where Zuck feels safe – so our investor invited Zuck and Nas over. They were chilling together, and I asked if I could take a photo. He was like “Let’s hold off, let’s hold off,” and I just couldn’t resist – I was drunk, and I went paparazzi and Instagrammed it, and I didn’t even think it would be a thing.

But then the press picked it up and apparently Zuck gets home and his whole PR crew is calling him every five seconds, and he told us to take it down. We wrote a letter of apology and I feel sorry. I regret taking it, I hope this has taught me some maturity, it certainly got me in a lot of trouble. But then on the other hand, fuck that fool – that’s Nas the Don.

Asked by Wakefield if there was anything else he wanted to discuss, Mr. Moghadam again volunteered:

Alright so I told you the New York Times is Carlos Slim’s ho, I told you Zuck can suck my dick, what else is there?

When Betabeat asked Mr. Moghadam about the tenor of those comments on gChat, he said, “i am so sorry, i love zuck, i think he should've made the photo w nas his fb profile pic. I talked to nas, nas loved him and loved the photo.” It was all “tongue in cheek,” he added, “but obvi this offends mark, he got me my last girlfriend, i feel terrible!”

Later, Mr. Moghadam requested that we note that he had taken a Vyvanse to prepare for a UC Berkeley Rap Genius colloquium after the Wakefield interview and was therefore “being negative on the come up." He also noted that he was “not surprised that the ‘guy’ (pun intended) who runs [Wakefield] went to harvard since havartis (as i call them) are little bitches. Also ‘harvard = illuminati, yale = KILLuminati (princeton = chilluminati).’”

Wonder what he calls Andreessen Horowitz?

Bloglords Never Worry In Emily Nussbaum's review of "Girls" for the New Yorker this week, she defined "concern trolling," as "the Internet term for one who ices her sneer with dignified worry." Valley regulars don't seem too familiar with the term. So for a fine example, let us direct you to Sarah Lacy's comments about her former coworker Alexia Tsotsis on Jason Calacanis' This Week In Tech. Whatever happened to putting the blog first?

The Bachelor: Silicon Valley Congratulations to investor Peter Thiel, who made Out magazine's third annual list of "Most Eligible Bachelors." Local suitors, please let us know if you get an invite to his raging Upper East Side dinner parties.

Nap Time Bre Pettis is a busy guy. Between running MakerBot Industries and traveling around for meetings and conferences, he has to get his zzz's in where he can. "Parking lot nap," he wrote alongside an Instagram of his car with a bridge in the background. Perhaps MakerBot should invest in some sweet nap pods a la Google.

(Photo: Instagram)

Be Mine If you didn't get enough fill of Valentine's Day yesterday, perhaps this tool for determining your Twitter crush will come in handy. Twitamore analyzes who you follow, @-reply and favorite to figure out who your Twitter Valentine is. Our favorites? The ones who love themselves.

Belly up the bar Wired editor Ryan Tate has a bone to pick with the makers of the bourbon Maker’s Mark, who recently announced they’d be adding just a little more water to their product. Quartz took questions for the company’s COO via Twitter, and here’s what Mr. Tate demanded to know: “What will you do for a living after burning the American bourbon industry’s reputation to the ground and destroying your company?” Two words, Mr. Tate: Woodford Reserve.

Attention, please Consider this a cri de coeur from your friendly neighborhood scolds: Please, please, please stop making these Harlem Shake videos. Rumor has it that even Sheryl Sandberg is somewhere in this Facebook video. It’s nice to break up the workday with a little caper, but unfortunately, tech companies seem to have trouble rounding up employees with rhythm.

There’s only one exception to this blanket condemnation, and that’s the dude who appears front and center in Google’s version, thrashing about in what appear to be lederhosen. He looks like he’s on serious party drugs, and he is mesmerizing, and he is now a GIF:

For those who read and run? When Atlantic Media launched Quartz, it positioned the digital only business publication as the news source for the new global elite: the type of jet-setting professionals more likely to read a news story from a tablet while sipping complementary champagne at 30,000 feet than to hunker over a desktop PC. It stood to reason then that Quartz would be an early adopter of the smart-watch Pebble.

Quartz reporter Christopher Mims also brushed off concerns that nerdlinger arm candy might look pretty goofy once it actually hit the market.

Rappers will gold-plate their iWatches and Google Glasses, and some guy will wear a phablet on a chain around his neck. You'll see.

— Christopher Mims (@mims) February 14, 2013

We think we know just the fella.

(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.

Kind of sad

Just two years after winning a SXSW Interactive award for Mobile apps, Gowalla has officially shut down. The location-based social networking start-up, once backed by investors including Kevin Rose and Jason Calacanis, was bought by Facebook in early December of last year but only put up a good-bye notice on its website today. The Next Web notes that the shut-down coincides with this week's South by Southwest and that Gowalla was based in SXSW's home city of Austin. Also, if you were a Gowalla user and concerned about the data you'd uploaded while using your account, you probably have nothing to worry about:

If you forgot to delete your account prior to the acquisition, fear not, the Facebook acquisition did not include all of the data the company has collected on your whereabouts over the years.

Simpler times

Mike Arrington has reportedly been fired from AOL, which currently owns TechCrunch, the blog he founded. That was the response to his demand, on TechCrunch, that AOL grant the site complete editorial independence or sell it back to him and the original stakeholders. Things are very much up in the air as to what will happen now that he's been canned, but on his personal Twitter account, Mr. Arrington is going about business as usual.

"TechCrunch Disrupt update - There will be well over 2,500 people attending next week, shattering our previous attendance record of 2,100," he wrote this afternoon. Like a proud father unable to handle the custody arrangement in a divorce, Mr. Arrington continues to use the paternal "our" in reference to TC Disrupt.

During the day yesterday, Mr. Arrington tweeted out three stories from his former team. There is no pretense, of course, that everything is normal. "@BrianGupton really, there's no way to script out what happened over the last week. seriously," he wrote, in response to a suggestion that the entire drama had been staged.

Mr. Arrington did, of course, orchestrate a similar drama last year, when he published a story on the "Angelgate" controversy a week before he was scheduled to appear onstage with many of the same VCs he was accusing of collusion. You don't have to be a fan of pro wrestling to see the similarities with this affair. Will Mr. Arrington, Tim Armstrong, and Arianna Huffington face off at TC Disrupt this coming week? Tune in to find out!

"Also, 700 hackers will be at Disrupt Hackathon starting tomorrow, all gunning to be the next GroupMe," Mr Arrington tweeted while Betabeat was composing this post. One wonders how long Mr. Arrington will go on tweeting as if he is still running TechCrunch. Has his ability to post freely to the actual site been terminated since his Spartan ultimatum? Maybe he can reminisce with his ex-friend Jason Calacanis--who sued Mr, Arrington after the TechCrunch 50 conference the two started together was sold off to AOL--about what it's like to lose your baby to an Armstrong.

Some excerpts:

1. Silent downvoting of competitors
If a favorable article about a competitor is on the front page, that link may silently get pushed back to the 3rd or 4th page. After about an hour, it will then slip off the site completely ...

2. Silent upvoting of YC-backed companies
If a YC company-based article is on the "/newest" article page, or the 3rd or 4th page of the main site, it may jump to the front page ... The deviation of the (votes) and (time submitted) is much higher than its siblings.

3. The use of undetectable "silent jails"
... Hacker News uses a devious silent banning mechanism for user accounts and domains. If you have been banned, or are tryign to post a link to a banned domain, everything will appear normal from your IP address, user account, and session. If you submit an article or comment, it will appear on your screen as normal, however no one else can see what you wrote or posted ...

4. Special front-page posts meant for YC backed company announcements (which cannot be voted on or commented on by users)
Ever see an article which you can't vote or comment on? It's a YC-backed company announcement. YC posts several of these a day ...

5. Poorly implemented circle voting counter-measures
Circle voting is a big problem for social bookmarking sites. It's the process of people abusing a large social network of friends to articially up-vote articles ... Hacker News has implemented this so poorly, that any articles that even get mildly upvoted too quickly by the same group of people are marked as "circle-voted," and put into a silent jail. If the article happens to be from a YC-based company, moderators simply take the link out of the jail and put it back on the front page.

The infographic goes on to claim Y Combinator is a pyramid scheme, with companies pressured to buy each other's products and failed companies fed to the strong ones.

"All the stuff about the banning is true," a source tells Betabeat, but questioned the allegations of a pyramid scheme. "Plausible maybe, I have no idea. They must have 300+ companies ... I only know of like, 10."

TECH BLAH-GOSPHERE. Silicon Alley newbie hipstress Brenna Ehrlich has left the cushy confines of Mashable, where they have lolz the cutest greeter evar, and resurfaced in Times Square as a senior writer for MTV O Music Awards, honoring digital musicians.

AND, NOW HIRING. Silicon Alley veteran Jason Calacanis is looking to poach talent: "I'm looking to add three more rookies to the team ... and one star to help lead them (if a star like +MG Siegler or +erick schonfeld or +Marshall Kirkpatrick or +Staci D Kramer becomes available)," he wrote on Google+, the newsletter mogul's latest venue for pondering.

AND YA COULDA CALLED ME, HENRY. Henry Blodget (BI/SAI) and Kara Swisher (ATD) had a Twitter/blog tiff over a Groupon internal memo obtained and published by ATD. Mr. Blodget wrote the memo had likely come from CEO Andrew Mason, seeking alternative routes to gossip during the start-ups quiet period in advance of its IPO; Ms. Swisher told him to stop trolling.

@karaswisher: I take issue with henry for claiming I made a deal to get Groupon memo, which is fictional

@hblodget: "No "claim". My speculation RT @karaswisher: I take issue with henry for claiming I made a deal to get Groupon memo, which is fictional"

@karaswisher: @hblodget Please. You really take the cake here. Let me be explicit: I made no deal with Groupon on this. I got lots of copies.