Charlie Warzel Profiles Techmeme’s Gabe Rivera

Charlie Warzel, writing for BuzzFeed:

Techmeme, then, wields tremendous power over a tremendously powerful group of people. And as its founder, Rivera has been quietly defining Silicon Valley’s narrative for the industry’s power brokers for more than a decade. But Rivera is uncomfortable — or unwilling — to reckon with how his influence has affected one of the most important and powerful industries in the world. The result is that Rivera can cast himself both as a gimlet-eyed insider with a powerful readership and as a mostly anonymous entrepreneur running a niche link blog from the comfort of his home. It’s a convenient cognitive dissonance.

I visit Techmeme once or twice on typical workdays. But I find it essential when I’m on vacation or otherwise offline for large stretches of time — it’s a great way to quickly check whether anything happened I need to know about. Nothing else like it.

★ Monday, 20 March 2017