Reverse Engineering TechMeme
OK, OK, since everyone has figured out that you can get on TechMeme by talking ABOUT TechMeme (even better if you attack A-list bloggers) I figured I'd just take my late night and reverse engineer TechMeme. — Two videos. Long, boring, videos that no one will watch.
Context & Ripple Effects
TechMeme criticism has escalated through October: on October 4 Dave Winer declared Techmeme officially a cesspool, and on October 13 Jason Calacanis fired back with what he billed as the official final word defending TechMeme against its haters. Robert Scoble now enters the fight from an unusual angle — not attacking or defending the aggregator, but publishing two long videos that claim to reverse engineer how it selects stories.
His thesis, per his own post: TechMeme can be reached by writing about TechMeme itself, or even better by attacking A-list bloggers — a self-referential loop he demonstrates while admitting the videos are 'long, boring' and likely unwatched. Geek News Central picked the story up under the broader banner 'Why Tech Blogging is Broken', folding one man's experiment into a wider indictment of how tech blogging rewards behavior.
First-order effects
- TechMeme's selection logic becomes public material: once a prominent blogger asserts the write-about-the-aggregator route onto it, every blogger watching the debate gains a documented playbook for chasing placement.
- Calacanis and Winer's dueling October takes get a third front — Scoble's videos turn a two-sided defense/attack argument into an empirical question about how the leaderboard actually works.
Second-order effects
- If enough bloggers act on the claimed trick, TechMeme's homepage fills with self-referential and A-list-attack posts, degrading the signal-to-noise that made the aggregator valuable and forcing whoever curates it to adjust.
- A-list bloggers become targets precisely because of their visibility — being attacked by smaller blogs becomes a cheap discovery strategy, which pressures the top tier to either disengage or respond and amplify their critics.
Third-order effects
- Aggregators that rank by cross-linking create incentive loops where the highest-value content is content about the ranking system itself — a governance problem every link-driven curator faces, whether handled by human editors, algorithm tweaks, or reputation rules.
- The episode feeds a growing narrative that tech blogging's attention economy is broken at the distribution layer, shifting the argument from individual complaints (Winer) and defenses (Calacanis) toward demands for systemic fixes.
The trend: Link-driven blog aggregators are entering a feedback-loop crisis in which writing about the aggregator becomes the most reliable path onto it, pushing curation toward editorial intervention.