Why TechMeme is great and the haters hate (the *official*, 100% approved, final word on TechMeme)
TechMeme is brilliant. — It takes conversations that are buzzing around in private and surfaces them for everyone to participate in. Is it perfect? No, of course not.
Context & Ripple Effects
Calacanis's defense lands mid-flare-up: four days after Scripting News branded Techmeme officially a cesspool, and two days after the Guardian argued that everyone overestimates Techmeme's influence. Until this post, the October 2007 argument had largely run one way — his piece is the first prominent pro-aggregator counterweight.
What makes the intervention notable is what it concedes alongside the praise: Techmeme is imperfect, and its real function is not neutrality but visibility — taking conversations buzzing around privately and surfacing them so anyone can participate. That framing turns the dispute from a quality complaint into a question about who controls which industry chatter becomes public.
First-order effects
- Calacanis publicly takes the opposite side of the Scripting News critique, converting a lone-blogger complaint into a named split among tech-media figures over whether Techmeme's front page is a service or a distortion.
- For Techmeme itself, the defense restates its core value proposition — surfacing private conversations for public participation — at exactly the moment its gatekeeping role is under attack.
Second-order effects
- Bloggers and startups gain a concrete incentive to optimize for Techmeme placement, since the aggregator effectively decides which private conversations become public ones — concentrating attention-pricing power in a single front page.
- The 'cesspool' framing now has to survive a visible, named defender rather than an uncontested field, raising the cost for critics of letting the label stick.
Third-order effects
- The fight previews the structural question every aggregation layer eventually faces: whoever owns the reading workflow, not whoever writes the stories, sets the tech industry's agenda — a capture dynamic that outlasts any single critic or defender.
- If the Guardian is right that Techmeme's influence is overestimated, the ecosystem may be optimizing for a leaderboard whose actual pull on reader behavior is smaller than participants assume — a widening gap between perceived and real gatekeeping power.
The trend: Tech news consumption is consolidating around human-curated aggregator front pages that set the industry's agenda, with arguments over their legitimacy becoming part of the very conversation they aggregate.