If you were in any part of the gaming or tech
community 2 years ago
You probably heard about this video
An eleven-minute dumpster fire
That ended a career,
And sparked a mini culture war
Within tech journalism
But, why did people care so much?
Well, back in 2018,
Verge reporter Stefan posted
A 2000 dollar gaming pc build
That was....
Problematic,
To say the least
Just toss that outta here
From wireless grounding bracelets
To backwards fans,
Every aspect of the video was ripped
to shreds by the pc building community
Now, a clueless journalist isn’t exactly
novel to these people,
And under normal circumstances,
Given a few months,
It would have faded back into
internet obscurity
But what makes this truly exceptional,
Is that every possible mistake was made
In handling the fallout
So without further ado,
This is the story,
Of Verge PC guy
So once the video was posted
Comments and likes were immediately disabled,
Causing mocking viewers to flock to Reddit
And Twitter with their criticisms
This spread the video more effectively
Then word of mouth ever could have
But this was only the first
Of their many mistakes
Then he tried defending himself on twitter.
Which was a
Big no-no
What's going on man?
You all good?
Yeaaaaaah
I work for a big publication
basicly I made a pc video
and some very angry nerds are very angry
with how I built the computer
but it still works
soooooo
ooooh
so you're just getting hated on
because they're like
if you would have plugged it in here it would
have *indestinct mocking*
that's exactly what they're doing
and I mean like everything they mentioned was
corrected after the fact as well
but like its not my first computer
and you know it still f*cking works
its a better computer then most of them have
that might be elitest but its the truth
It only fed the trolls
And the slew of defensive articles only encouraged
further ridicule
It soon began turning into a political issue,
And once those people dogpiled on
There was no stopping this discussion
The video was taken down a few days later,
But by then
The damage was already done
The virality of the video pushed reactions
to the top of youtube recommendations,
Almost everyone had heard about it
And then just when interest had begun to dwindle,
Youtube got slapped by legal
Now lawyers from the verge had had the bright idea to go straight to youtube
With copyright claims for 2 of the most popular reaction videos,
And Obviously
The internet
Had a predictable
response
A new wave of outrage led to renewed scrutiny
about the original video
And Stefans reputation
Never really recovered
A few months later the Verge cut their losses,
And on April 18th, 2019,
A disgraced Stefan
Ended his tenure at the company
So you might ask
What’s he doing now?
Well, his twitter is still dogged by the occasional
mocking joke,
But the most lasting damage
Can be seen in his career
A veteran writer of CNN, The Verge and Tech
Crunch reduced to sporadic freelance work
Nowadays he mostly just tweets about apple products with
predictable engagement
Now I guess the real question is if this was this justice?
I’m not going to pretend like his was a
defensible product for the employe of a tech company,
But it does feel like a bit of a hollow victory
I think the bigger issue is that
People filmed,
edited and posted that video with no objections
At that same tech company
As journalism shrinks the industry has desperately
tried to cut corners
And shift from pure reporting to a weird hybrid model
But skillset to review a product and to understand how it works
Are two very different areas of expertise,
And their overlap is often tragically undervalued by
struggling companies
While his firing wasn’t without real cause,
My real frustration is that the company
Didn’t learn from it
They still post inaccurate articles and botched
review
Following the same personnel practices that
put him in charge of a PC build.
I guess what I’m saying is,
While he may have been wrong,
If we wanted real change,
He isn’t the one we should have held so
accountable.
So that’s the story of Verge pc guy
A tale of hilarious ineptitude and internet justice
That in my opinion,
Could have been so much more.
But that is just my opinion
Let me know what you guys think in the comments
below!
And I love to hear your thoughts, so feel free
to disagree.
Like and subscribe for more Ponji Ninja,
And I’ll catch you guys next time.
You always have to make sure that you really
Hammer it in
(Like this point lol)
