New details emerge in a story by the New York Times including an interview with Choi and questions about his background and allegations of not fulfilling advertising contracts.
> Kim has a couple theories as to why her post struck a chord in the startup world. First, she thinks anonymizing the startup stirred interest, referencing a concept with which she became familiar after writing the post: the Streisand effect. It's the idea that hiding information can have the unintended consequence of publicizing it by motivating people to find out what's missing.
Argh. That's not the Streisand Effect, the SE is what happens when the subject tries to suppress the story, especially using legal threats (which happened too, but only quite a bit after the Medium post was getting traction).
The name of the phenomenon of secrecy driving up interest is the Information Gap effect, IIRC. Plus, in this case, we can add rubbernecking (also known as morbid curiosity) driving up interest.
I actually feel sorry for the poor girl. She's very, very young and she's suddenly been thrust in a circumstance where she has to decide whether to be loyal or bail. And she's probably getting paid (according to other stories posted).
So here's this kid faced with the choice of basically being homeless or becoming WrkRiot's version of the Minister of Information.
And then the deluge of hate and venom spewed at her direction not just her role at her company, but personally as well. She not only protected her personal Twitter but has now changed it trying to hide.
Yeah, I feel sorry for her. She's a kid who got in over her head and now she's reaping the consequences of those choices.
That there was apparently not NDA required on her exit more than anything just how amateur this Choi is. All he had to do was give her an extra grand specifically as compared consideration for an NDA and nothing but the government complaints would be said. Obviously you can't prohibit the reporting of a crime but she already did that anyway.
Which makes me wonder, why isn't she under an NDA already? Every one I've signed prohibit discussing practices even after termination for cause.
Perhaps because said NDA wouldn't stand up in the event that they didn't pay? (especially since the disclosures related to said lack of payment). She wasn't disclosing their secret sauce recipe.
Yes, the name to which I've referred is the pseudonym Jessica though her real name is not a matter of record, though powers-that-be consider discussion of her on this forum now to be a witch hunt and off-topic.
This is just pure opinion, but to me it is hard to read and unprofessional. It is certainly unique, but it doesn't project seriousness, which is what I want out of a job discovery service. Omitting the vowel just has the ring of a shady knockoff, scammer, or malware site that capitalizes on typos. Maybe I'm just not used to seeing the consonant string in trademarks or company names, but it strikes me as peculiar rather than creative or edgy.
Second thought: this is a company which can't even manage to register "workriot.com". Even if "WrkRiot" is the brand, I would expect them to grab the domain with the more obvious spelling and have it redirect to wrkriot, but it turns out "workriot.com" is registered to a Finnish hosting provider sitting on the domain. So to recap: the domain with the more obvious alternate spelling of the company is (very likely) up for sale but they still haven't managed to acquire it. That does not engender much confidence in their marketing or management.
In general misspellings are considered bad for SEO because search engines suggest correcting their name to something else. I'm not sure whether that applies here but I have seen it for startups that vowel drop weirdly, etc.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/01/technology/a-silicon-valle...