So Gawker filed for Chapter 11 yesterday. I read the news over coffee, refreshed it twice to make sure I wasn't misreading a headline, and then just sat there for a minute. Nick Denton's whole operation, the one that basically invented the modern gossip-and-tech blog empire, is now technically bankrupt while it appeals that $140 million verdict from the Hulk Hogan case. Filing for bankruptcy protection is apparently a move to buy time and look for a buyer without the Bollea judgment forcing a fire sale. I'm not a lawyer, I just read a lot of legal blogs written by people who also aren't lawyers, so take that summary for what it's worth.
The part of this that actually gets me isn't the money. It's that we know now, and have known for a few weeks, that Peter Thiel was quietly bankrolling Hogan's case the whole time, because Valleywag outed him back in 2007 and he never forgave anyone involved. A billionaire spent something like ten million dollars funding somebody else's lawsuit for almost a decade, waiting, and it worked. That is such a strange, patient kind of grudge. Most people who get mad at a blog post just leave an angry comment and move on with their lives. I know because I've gotten those comments.
I started this blog in November 2011, which means I've technically been doing this longer than some of Gawker's own sites existed in their most recognizable form. And I read those sites constantly back then, Gizmodo for the gadget stuff, Kotaku when I should've been working, Deadspin on days I pretended to care about sports. I never read Jezebel much, not my beat, but I respected that it existed. What I actually want to talk about, though, is Kinja.
Kinja was Gawker's homegrown publishing platform, the CMS they built themselves instead of just running WordPress like the rest of us mortals. And I have opinions about Kinja. Mainly that it was a mess. The nested comment threads, the way posts could get "dismissed" and buried, the constant redesigns that nobody asked for, I used to read the comment sections on Gizmodo just to watch commenters complain about the commenting system itself, which felt very on brand for the internet in 2013. I always thought it was a little bit insane that a media company decided the smartest use of its engineering time was reinventing blog software from scratch instead of, I don't know, hiring more reporters. But I guess when you're Gawker in its prime you can afford both.
Here's the thing that actually keeps nagging at me this morning, sitting here writing this on the same static site setup I've used since I started. This blog gets maybe a few hundred readers on a good day, if that. Nobody's ever sued me over anything I've written, mostly because nobody with money has ever noticed I exist, which is either sad or the safest possible position to be in, depending on your mood. Gawker existed on the opposite end of that spectrum, big enough and sharp-elbowed enough that eventually someone with nine figures decided it was worth destroying, personally, patiently, over the better part of a decade. There's a lesson in there about scale and exposure that I don't think I'm smart enough to fully articulate before finishing my coffee, but it's rattling around in my head anyway.
I'll say this plainly, since I try not to hedge on this blog: I think what Thiel did is worse than what Gawker did to him, even though outing someone in 2007 was a genuinely lousy thing to do and I'm not defending it. Funding a proxy war against a media company in total secret, for years, using someone else's grievance as the vehicle, is a scarier precedent than one bad blog post from a website that, by most accounts, later regretted running it. Money quietly deciding which publications get to survive isn't a new problem. It's just rarely this visible, or this well-timed against a company that had already made plenty of its own enemies.
Anyway. Uber also apparently pulled in $3.5 billion from Saudi Arabia's investment fund a little over a week ago, which under normal circumstances would've been the biggest business story of my month, and today it's basically a footnote. Funny how that works.