Misc

Mike Elgan Trashes TWiT Sponsor On-Air, Again

40 Comments

Village Idiot
Village Idiot
During Tech News Today Mike Elgan stated he would not renew his PayPal account in protest over Paypal’s change to their Terms of Service.

Gum had this to say:

“Well, um, I guess, everybody who’s listening to this and watching this show uh has a choice to either uh-uh agree to the user agreement thuh. This’ll be the uh yuh-you’ll be uh asked very soon to uh renew your agreement uh with the new agreement. Uh I personally am not going to. I’m gonna cancel my PayPal account over this, and I suspect that some people will.”

PayPay subsidiary and TNT sponsor Braintree Payments could not be reached for comment. TWiT hosts have previously trashed sponsors on-air:

The Video

40 thoughts on “Mike Elgan Trashes TWiT Sponsor On-Air, Again”

    2. Seriously, I thought the ‘uh’s and ‘um’s were added by the blogger, but lo and behold when I watched the video it was like reading closed captioning.

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      6. Omg that site is bad. First of all, it’s already out of date design wise. The carrousel is ridiculous and useless. Why is there black boxes covering the pictures ? The color pallet is terrible, fonts are horrid. Does this site even support retina graphics?
        Leo kept talking about the Hamburg menu. Is this what they had scrums to discuss, because that is the least of his worries. This is only slightly better then the old site, yet still the worst podcast site I have ever seen.

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    2. There is not one thing I would keep about that site. It is all wrong. Colors, font, layout. I even went to navigate to shows, and it was confusing. The wording of the menus are bad. The side menu doesn’t close if you tap the content area. The API, makes every page load slower, because instead of loading a page like every other site in the world, they are using an API. Wow wee, so the page waits for all the data to load before rendering. Terrible terrible terrible. The media player just has a blank screen before you play, no artwork. Audio player controls are too small. On and on and on, no one thing to preserve. Feel soooo bad for Leo.

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          1. I forget this.

            “We have tested rotating offers many times and have found it to be a poor way of presenting home page content.”
            wider funnel

            I guess that is some web 4.0 maven.

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    3. This pretty much sums up the problems with TWIT in one, incredibly expensive and poorly designed website. Has anyone explained what’s happening under the hood of this site to warrant such a price tag? I’ve seen Leo go on and on about having an API, but what tangible benefit does this bring? People have made apps for TWIT shows in the past without the existence of said API.

      From a design standpoint, this is all old news. Carousels had their day; the reveal menu … meh. There’s so few options there it’s not really necessary. Color choice is curious since the palette isn’t at all TWIT colors of blue, black, and red. Very bland and boring looking.

      Technically it’s … confusing. There’s very little done in the code for SEO, not all URL’s are well formed, the auto play … why? Why make it auto play? Yes, I get that I clicked on a show, but no, I don’t want it to start right away. Sure I can change autostart=true to autostart=false in the address bar … but no.

      Title tags not properly formed, meta tags left out, looks to be no social networking integration. I would expect this as perhaps a first draft, not a completed project with almost a year of work into it. I wish I had clients this gullible to pay so much for so little…

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  4. TD is not a reliable source for news anymore. The actual quote is below. Author left out half the uh ums.

    “Well, um, I guess, everybody who’s uh sorta listening to uh this and kinda watching this y’know uh show uh has a choice to um either uh-uh agree to the user sorta agreement thuh. This’ll be the uh yuh-you’ll be uh asked very soon to uh sorta like renew your your uh ah uh agreement uh with the new new new agreement. Uh I personally uh am not going to. I’m gonna kinda cancel my PayPal account over this, and uh I personally suspect that uh um some people you know will.”

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  5. …at least the lower 1/3’s are visable and if Leo’s mouth is hidden that’ll be a plus, the remainder of the site is horrid. Maybe Lisa will jump in and clean up the remaining spuge…

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  6. Looks like Elgan’s Trolling another company he feels wronged him. In this case PayPal refused to allow him to return used sex toys after the last swingers party because they had been used and were no longer sanitary.

    This King of Illiteracy called Mike Elgan keeps using TNT to propagandize his personal hates, he is worse than Goebels.

    No wonder he has the title “The Worlds most hated Tech Journalist” a title he didn’t even have to try hard to win.

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    1. Journalist? Somebody actually called him a journalist?

      He can’t write, can’t talk, apparently can’t read and spends all of 5 minutes reading reddit and techcrunch before every show for his content.

      Not a journalist…

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  8. One thing needs to be said. Sorry, but: this actually shows editorial independence: they are not afraid to trash their hosts.

    The PayPal change is fucking outrageous – you will be forced to grant them the right to robocall you, using not just the phone number you give them, but numbers obtained from “other” sources. You don’t have a choice – it’s “agree or leave”.

    So, as much as I think Elgrim is a terrible, terrible presenter, a deep void of nothing worth listening to, and a really poor troll who claims Starbucks is a technology company and that Facebook is Apple’s biggest competitior, it *is* good that he didn’t care about the sponsor when talking about this.

    But, I have to say, he probably has no idea that PayPal owns Braintree. So, shut up evilpants. Ok, I’ll shut up.

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    1. I think Elgan gets hate for being the step dad that came in after Tom Merritt and failing to fill those shoes. Paypal can go eat a Leo Laporte dick pic.

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  9. This is too funny not to post. From the ‘About’ page on the new web site:

    “As we’ve grown, our facilities have expanded into a multimillion dollar studio and a full staff to produce over 30 hours of content a week. Our live stream lets you watch and listen to our shows being produced, along with other incidental coverage of tech issues, breaking news, and Leo’s personal life. You can watch live every day of the week (and re-runs when we’re not live) at http://live.twit.tv/.”

    Leo’s personal life. No shit Soup!

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  11. Evilpants: The problem with Elgum writing that Starbucks is a tech company is not that he’s wrong — he’s absolutely right about that — but that it’s not an original idea. A lot of people have said it and still say it: https://goo.gl/GZI3EN

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    1. That’s Elgrim all over – taking other people’s ideas and then explaining them badly 🙂

      I’m still not sure I agree with the premise (of Starbucks being a tech company), but I do take your point.

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  13. To be honest I’d prefer he trashed a sponsor than blindly backed one – that would be less ethical. Still, there’s no getting away from the fact that he’s not such a news reader / presenter ..

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  14. lol, oh man, the videos here are too funny!! Mike, I hear that they are hiring dish washer down the street from Twit, you might be better off with no one watching you read news.

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