I hate being meta sometimes. That said we’ve literally received enough emails about a story that shot to the top of /r/bitcoin that we have to address it.
So, we’ve actually seen this @TomOnBTC guy before posting about things. We are constantly checking Twitter for new stories, new people, and new things going on in the Bitcoin community but we didn’t see this coming until later this evening. We gave him a follow after reading his piece about alt coin botnets and figured that would be the last we would be hearing of him for a while.
Tom Butterfield wrote an interesting piece on Medium that basically is calling out tons of news sites for accepting money to write stories.
Apparently hangletonweblogs amongst many others were part of his “sting operation” where he tried to catch and then call out sites that are essentially offering stories on the site for cash.
I’ve been really torn about this story. Many of my personal friends here in the Bitcoin world were jumping all over this story on reddit and commenting and asking when I would make some statements about it but I just wasn’t overly comfortable being pulled in to some major drama but I’ve been thinking about it for the last several hours and trying to decide how to handle it.
hangletonweblogs of course was found to be “not guilty” because we do not, will not, and never will accept cash for a story and I feel very strongly about this.
That said given some of the emails we are now receiving I do feel it is a good idea to at least address this entire thing.
Our stance is hangletonweblogs does not accept cash for stories. Never have, never will.
After emailing back and forth with Tom I can tell you the guy is very passionate and wants to “see everyone collectively do better” and we want that as well. I can’t speak to the other sites mentioned in the article but it appears that he has certainly stirred up the pot.
So, I’ll end this piece with that and simply reiterate that hangletonweblogs doesn’t accept cash for stories. That isn’t going to change either.