More on SugarString →

T.C. Sottek at The Verge:

For now, it’s easy to shrug off Sugarstring as just another hilariously dumb attempt to make a corporate brand look cool. Its format is somewhere between Digg, BuzzFeed, and Verizon’s corporate blog. It appears to gather much of its content from Reddit. It’s powered by WordPress. It inexplicably has 74,000 Twitter followers. It publishes headlines like “Can you survive without chatting at work?” and “Three reasons Neil DeGrasse Tyson is wrong about innovation.”

But in the broader context, Sugarstring is frightening. It resembles a future where enormous corporations that own the pipes through which speech travels also own that speech. Hell, that’s not even a vision of the future; Comcast already owns NBC, and its promises for good behavior as a vertically integrated superpower have an expiration date.

So far we’ve been worried about the subtle effects of corporate control of the internet — stuff like data caps, and throttling, and “fast lanes.” Sugarstring is something entirely different. It’s brazen, disrespectful, and deeply cynical. There can only be two possibilities for its existence: Verizon thinks people aren’t paying attention, or they’re just too stupid to get it.