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Comment by kevinburke | Hacker News Reader

Mike Isaac (reporter for the New York Times) is collecting more stories of harassment & toxic work environment at Uber: https://twitter.com/MikeIsaac/status/833445850130944000

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One of the things that this article got me thinking about is how much less effective that model is. Sure, some Sunday from now, maybe there's a NYT expose that reaches a national audience. Before that happens, the NYT reporters will reach out to Uber senior management for comment and give it time to compose some hollow PR about how seriously it takes the matter and that will run alongside the actual stories of problems.

Here we get the raw unvarnished story of someone effected and people can make their own conclusions. There's no middle man trying to make a buck and the making a buck is why NYT it's 'maybe there's an NYT expose.' Lawyers, advertisers, and other more important news all are considerations at editorial board meetings. Lots of stories get spiked.

The upside is that you get a professional team of fact checkers evaluating the claims. This allows (for instance) people to come forward anonymously but still credibly.

I get where you are coming from but here is no such thing as perfectly objective account or opinion. Whatever second-hand experience you gather will be colored by agenda and biases of the people conveying those messages to you.

Given that, I would be more comfortable with having a _relatively_ reliable source that I can vet via reputation and prior experience. It still doesn't mean I would just take that as a ground truth. But it's a significant difference between that and just having a bunch of anonymous eyewitness accounts.

Taking anything anybody says online seriously IS where fake news come from.

Hopefully he can turn the story around fast enough to get in while public attention is focused here.

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