Defector

Deadspin's motto was "Sports news without access, favor or discretion". Unlike traditional media that essentially acts as mouthpieces for the teams that they cover (think of any press conference and the kinds of questions being asked, and the types of response they're designed to elicit), they used their status as outsiders to look at sports with a critical lens, and hold people in power in sports to account.

This didn't mean they hated sports though - you could tell from most of their reporting, especially by the OGs(Will Leitch, Drew Magary, Tim Burke etc), that they LOVED sports and wanted the people and teams involved to just be better. They also broke a lot of bonkers stories like the Manti Te'o scandal (highly recommend reading their report on it)[1] that no one in traditional media did a good job of interrograting or digging into.

The site still exists, but if you read it now you won't see this kind of reporting. It all changed about two years when they were bought by private equity (G/O I wanna say) who attempted to exercise control over their editorial, resulting in a mass resignation. Many of the old writers started Defector (https://defector.com/), which writes in the same spirit.

[1] https://deadspin.com/manti-teos-dead-girlfriend-the-most-heartbreaking-an-5976517

https://web.archive.org/web/20210630043947/https://www.businessinsider.com/great-jones-cookware-founders-tishgart-moelis-falling-out-2021-6

Great commentary here:
https://defector.com/great-jones-drama/

"The absolute most generous true description you can apply to Great Jones is that it conducts arbitrage on cheap pastel-colored cookware with flimsy enamel cladding, made by other companies with less robust brands. But the truest thing you can say is that Great Jones, like so many other companies, is a skimming operation: It launders somebody else’s actual manufacture through its own aggressive branding, and takes a cut of the proceeds. The company can have the best quarter of its existence despite having no full-time employees, despite having literally no capacity to do anything other than exist as a legal fiction, because it never actually did anything. Anything! It never did anything."

Honestly, it was partly my faith in money that made me comfortable with Twitter as a public company. They (gradually and often reluctantly) learned that if they wanted to be a viable business, they had to provide a reasonably safe place for a lot of people. For purely pecuniary reasons, they also thought they needed to be a good partner to people building things related to Twitter.

All that has gone by the wayside, of course. Part of the problem here is that Musk had so much money he could afford to burn tens of billions of dollars on a weird personal fixation. [1] A problem that the market has happily started to correct, [2] but perhaps not soon enough to save Twitter.

[1] One possible explanation is here: https://defector.com/i-was-almost-elon-musks-twitter-voice

[2] He even set a record! https://www.npr.org/2023/01/12/1148634966/elon-musk-guinness-world-records

While I understand that, it's not trivial to unambiguously classify when something has no property of "value". It's easy to contrive your fartcoin example, but if this were universally true you couldn't use the words "memecoin" and "rugpull" in the same context (because there's no rug to pull when something has no value) and yet that is all I see. Say recently

https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=milei-memecoin-promotion

https://www.latintimes.com/crypto-trader-shot-himself-live-x-after-losing-hundreds-meme-coin-rug-pull-his-dying-wish-576586

https://defector.com/the-hawk-tuah-memecoin-rug-pull-is-the-apotheosis-of-bag-culture

https://beincrypto.com/kanye-west-barkmeta-meme-coin-controversy/

https://beincrypto.com/libra-meme-coin-linked-to-melania/

https://www.ccn.com/news/crypto/child-streamers-30k-crypto-rug-pull-stunt-harsh-memecoin-reality/

“Thirdly, early adopters mine or buy large proportions of the total supply at negligible costs while late adopters mine or buy negligible proportions at large costs. It follows that holders immediately have every incentive to get as many people to buy after them. Like stocks? Like stocks, but without the dividends or anything tangible in the real world. Congratulations, you got yourself a pyramid scheme.” —
https://www.cynicusrex.com/file/cryptocultscience.html

This podcast, after the first half, really goes into depth why all contemporary crypto“currencies” are inherently flawed: https://anchor.fm/when-the-music-stops/episodes/Nano--Digital-Cash-w-Patrick-Luberus-e15db6b.

Another good article: https://defector.com/cryptocurrency-bad-and-weird/.

You can usually at least try to see any wiki information and about us info for a site or resource. Those are both available for Defector which show it is credible, former employees of Deadspin:

https://defector.com/about-us/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defector_Media

You could say it might be even more credible than other places since it is employee owned. A small trend of modern media sites like https://Clickhole.com which was bought from being The Onion subsidiary, both owned by the same new bad parent company as Deadspin. Except for Clickhole I believe Cards Against Humanity bought the site and then let it be employee owned. Even cooler!