>rather than taking [Redditors'] skepticism seriously, many media outlets pounced instead on the story of their “rage,” scouring the site for examples of death threats, violence, or outright lunacy, which were then published with much fanfare.

We are still learning how to live in a connected and recorded world. Even the most coherent natural conversations, when put on paper, make for strained reading. The thread of thought jerks around implications and exclamations of hyperbole. Cherry-picking hiccups is a thoughtless exercise in missing the forest for the trees.

We lived in a connected world before. Small town talk connected communities. The chatter then was likely as belligerent as Twitter is today. The difference, though, is gossip is (usually) ephemeral while written words persist. Society didn't seek to document and re-broadcast the petty thoughts of suburban Geneva on the loucheness of New Yorkers. If something was to cross the Atlantic, it would have to carry more substance.

Perhaps it will take a new generation of reporters to effect the change. One more enamoured by, and driven to explore, the message versus the medium.

I can't get over the fact that the New Yorker is quoting some reddit users using their online nicknames.

I'm a little surprised that the New Yorker (although this is a New Yorker blog, so maybe it's not the "real" New Yorker) is doing the HuffPo/Gawker/Buzzfeed kind of "look what just happened on Reddit!" type of post.

However, as a former reporter, I can understand the temptation of looking at reddit as a treasure trove of quotes and opinions that require no more than a few clicks to use in an article.

Interesting that the writer seems to take what is described as "rage" (a meme reference) and "sound and fury" (idiomatic) literally. Other than that, this is rather a tardy and something less than nuanced summary of the events of the last week or so. Kind of strange - I thought the magazine was working to modernize its tech coverage.

I don't know how often I have actually seen this, but it was interesting to note that the references to Newsweek were simply italics instead of hyperlinks. After recently studying pagerank I found that an interesting tactic, whether or now pure hyperlinks are stil used in the calculations vs some other metric.

anyone remember this? In 2011, they did like 5 page investigative piece trying to find Satoshi Nakamoto's true identity.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/10/10/111010fa_fact_...

I love how they are trying to play dumb now when they were the ones that originally crossed the lines.

> "no paper, copper, or silver—just thirty-one lines of code"

Joshua Davis is incompetent. Maria Bustillos is incompetent too.

I hope, for this man's sake and for the reporter too, that this story's evaporation of its shelf life is expiring.

It just feels like something that belongs in those trashy grocery store gossip magazines, meanwhile we're the rubberneckers causing some sort of metaphorical traffic jam.

I have a Satoshi theory.

During the early-2000's there was an online location (being deliberately vague here) where there was an individual who was very excited about the idea of decentralised accounting.

At the time most people ignored everything that author was saying. Now, his comments seem strangely prescient.

That authors writing seems somewhat similar to Satoshi's, too.

Additionally at least one domain name that author had control over is a Japanese site (although it looks to be pretty spammy, and not Bitcoin related).

OTOH, there was little evidence that I saw that this person had the necessary skills to create Bitcoin.

In this topic, a mainstream media publication treats a loosely coupled online group of millions of disparate people as if they were a monolithic entity.

News at 11.

Is the supposed Satoshi Nakamoto posting in these forums using Tor? If not, what is his IP address?

The people with the means (NSA, CIA, etc) already know who he is (or can easily find out).