Long ago I was such a heavy Tech Crunch reader that I was in the top 5 most liked commenters (below MG and Arrington) back when they still used Disqus.

http://i.imgur.com/1lgnC.png Yep that's me. I was in deep.

TC is both good & bad and a LOT of things to different people:

1) TC is for people who dream about becoming entrepreneurs and are seeking reasons or a "push" to motivate themselves to finally dive in.

2) It's a platform for validation and lifestyle glorification (what Fox News is to Republican party). It can lead to both encouragement and ignorance. It's highly Silicon Valley oriented and its addicted readers are mostly wanna-be-entrepreneurs (myself included, no shame here) who wish they were in Silicon Valley working on a startup. The same way celebrity wanna-bes browse celebrity sites all day, wantrepreneurs (like me) would browse Hacker News, Tech Crunch, Digg, and (the old) Reddit. Even though you couldn't be there in "the action" you could read about it and pretend and daydream. Pathetic but hey, emotions are emotions.

3) After a certain amount of time Tech Crunch becomes unhealthy for you. It portrays an extremely unrealistic view of startups, companies, and success. And ingores everything else. Because failure is a journey that can lead to success and all things by default fail, glorifying success is damaging to entrepreneurs. TC is great for initial motivation but afterwords if you don't let go of it you'll start to take on its unhealthy attitude towards business. It's like getting a 12 year old fashion loving girl a subscription to Vogue, it might be encouraging at first but if she falls in too deep she'll start taking on Vogue's obsessions. Before you know it she'll be 40 pounds underweight, with bleached blonde hair, and $12,000 worth of shoes.

4) TC over-rewards VC funded startups and ignores inventors, designers, hackers, projects, bootstrapping, and non web businesses. To Techcrunch, success is getting funded or acquired. It focuses on the end-product not the journey. And for entreprenuers that's just a trap for perpetual day-dreaming. Fantasizing about success without ever working towards it.

5) TC is also a status symbol and oligarchy. OMG you got on TC!!! Holy Shit you're going to get so many users and VCs are going to call you and your server might crash... Piss off Arrington and you'll never be on TC. To be on Tech Crunch means you have been approved and accepted by an elite group of Silicon Valley journalists who can make you famous. Once Arrington & friends left after the AOL aquisition there was no more elite group to seek validation and fame from. TC went downhill in popularity and visitors.

I feel like TC was initially designed for investors with its generic "who got funded" articles but was later re-purposed as a lifestyle glorifier. Which lead to a jump in traffic, Arrington becoming the Godfather of Silicon Valley reporting. And TC transitioned into a fame-machine. Got acquired by AOL. Arrington left, friends followed. No more elites, just a news site now.

FYI: I left TC long ago when I outgrew it. The initial encouragement wore off & I wasn't getting anything out of it. I've started outgrowing Hacker News as well. I finally dove in, risked $2,000 made my first 2 products, and am selling them on Ebay. http://www.ebay.com/sch/purplevioletka/m.html?item=330829651...
(shameless link)