TechCrunch has a dedicated but very outspoken readership. This has really helped the site grow because the people reading are, to a certain extent, the movers and shakers of the industry so there is not surprise that they often feel strongly about the topics being covered. There is no covering up the fact that once in a while they don't agree with the posts on the site, but all the readers are never happy all the time, so the authors generally take this in stride.

Yesterday Mike Arrington posted about TrustedID, a service designed to help fight ID theft. The post seemed harmless enough- it was quite positive (maybe a bit too much so) but the service was a good enough idea and it was said to be backed up by a trustworthy company. I skimmed it over and did not think much of it, that is until I saw the comments. (I did not sign up or try it out)

Some choice comments:

Is this an infomercial? Mike, whats the deal?

Hmm..seems like techcrunch might be taking $$$ to promote crap to the trusting followers who rely on so far pretty honest reviews... IDfreeze might be fighting for a good cause but this is not a place to promote it.

Are you doing paid PR for those guys?

Heh, so let me get this straight. You just dropped references for both you and your co-founder to tell us that you aren’t just any JoeDoes off the street. So your co-founder was the _webmaster_ for Netscape? Are you fucking kidding me? Am I supposed to be all relaxed now knowing that one of the executives for this company used to be a webmonkey for netscape.com? Give me a fucking break. If you are so intimate with the inner workings of this industry, why didn’t the website contain proper information to begin with? This is a joke, except it’s not funny.

And they keep going on like that. The high majority of the comments are anonymous (no site or email), and they keep coming, slam after slam. Arrington responds a few times at the end (the comments must have been brought to his attention) and brings up some good points, but seems somewhat offended. It is hard not to take such things personally, though people definitely don't think much and tend to go overboard when they are writing anonymously.

Something like this is not really that bad of a thing to happen to a blog. It seems bad at the time and you may lose a few readers over it, but the author was not at fault here, he just liked the product. It was clear that some things were left out of the article, details that would have not caused so much vitriol from the commentors, but firing up the readers now and then will keep them coming back and reading closely. You definitely don't want them thinking you are biased or some sort of paid PR service, and the fact that Arrington writes that he will be using TrustedID in the future helps justify our belief that he simply likes the service, but also make it seem like he has already made up his mind and is trying to sell something to us.