I have very strong, probably controversial, feeling on arstechnica, but I believe the acquisition from Condé Nast has been a tragedy.
Ars writers used to be actual experts, sometimes even phd level, on technical fields. And they used to write fantastical and very informative articles. Who is left now?
There are still a couple of good writers from the old guard and the occasional good new one, but the website is flooded with "tech journalist", claiming to be "android or Apple product experts" or stuff like that, publishing articles that are 90% press material from some company and most of the times seems to have very little technical knowledge.
They also started writing product reviews that I would not be surprised to find out being sponsored, given their content.
Also what's the business with those weirdly formatted articles from wired?
Still a very good website but the quality is diving.
> I have very strong, probably controversial, feeling on arstechnica, but I believe the acquisition from Condé Nast has been a tragedy.
For the curious, this acquisition was 18 years ago.
I read ars technica during undergrad over 20 years ago now. It complemented my learning in cpu architecture quite well. While in class we learned old stuff, they covered the modern Intel things. And also, who could forget the fantastically detailed and expert macOS reviews. I’ve never seen any reviews of any kind like that since.
I dropped ars from my rss sometime around covid when they basically dropped their journalism levels to reddit quality. Same hive mind and covering lots of non technical (political) topics. No longer representing its namesake!
Oddly enough it's not the first time I've seen their perceived recent drop in quality blamed on this. Just weird that it's happened twice - wonder where this narrative is coming from.
No, their quality has been dropping since the acquisition; it's just now gotten to the point where it cannot be explained away.
God, I didn't need to know that
How do I report online harassment? There's probably a button but I can't find it because I misplaced my reading glasses.
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I checked and was also expecting something different based on parent's comment.
Happened 18 years ago.
This is a hot take that has become room temp.
Boeing merged with McDonnell Douglas almost 30 years ago, but that's still a major reason they suck today.
The transformation has been very slow I believe. They didn't really intrude too much the first few years. But maybe I remember wrong.
It gets pretty bad at times. Here's one of the most mindlessly uncritical pieces I've seen, which seems to be a press release from Volkswagen: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2017/03/volkswagen-unveils-sedr... Look at the image captions gushing about the "roomy interior" of a vehicle that doesn't even exist! I actually wrote in to say how disappointed I was in this ad/press release material, and the response was "That was not a VW ad and we were not paid by VW for that or any other story". I find it interesting that they only denied the ad part, not the press release part...
As I mention in another comment, https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/01/exclusive-volvo-tells-u... is in a similar vein.
"I'm a professional shopper, and here's what I say you should buy" because someone sent me a free version of it or just straight copy to use in my listicle.
It is sad that this is what journalism has come to. It is even sadder that it works.
Wirecutter was a good premise, but now it and everyone copying it are untrustworthy.
It feels like the human version of AI hallucination: saying what they think is convincing without regard for if it's sincere. And because it mimics trusted speech, it can slip right by your defense mechanisms.
I think it's smart to be skeptical of any "review" site that depends on affiliate links for income. The incentive is no longer to provide advice, it's to sell you something. Anything. Click the link. Good. Now buy something. That's right. Add it to your basket. It doesn't matter what you buy. Yes, higher priced items are better. Checkout. We get our sweet kickback, nice.
Unfortunately, every review site uses affiliate links. Even organizations with very high ethical standards like Consumer Reports use them now. At least CR still gets most of its income from subscriptions and memberships. I guess that's something.
Wirecutter is part of NYTimes and depends on crosswords for income.
I haven't always agreed with them and sometimes the articles are clearly wrong because they're several years old, but they're usually good.
(I think I last seriously disagreed with them about a waffle maker.)
Wirecutter still seems pretty good for stuff you aren't really expert on or have strong opinions about. But that was true of Consumer Reports in the old days too. Not saying it's perfect but, especially for low-value purchases, you probably won't go too far wrong.
Any good idea will be copied by those with lesser motives.
I'm willing to believe it was not an ad.
They are just lazy / understaffed. It's hard to make $ in journalism. A longstanding and popular way to cut corners is to let the industry you cover do most of the work for you. You just re-package press releases. You have plausible content for a fraction of the effort / cost.
Unfortunately, government is like that were most bills are written by lobbyists and barely if at all modified by the actual congress critter sponsoring it.
I think that's much more common in state government (in the US).
Most bill in the US Congress are not actually meant to pass, they are just (often poorly written) PR stunts.
Automotive journalists are in a weird category in almost any publication. They're all dependant on manufacturers providing press units and attending press events that include comp for travel and hotels.
AFAIK the only real exception is Consumer Reports.
It’s worse than that - sometimes they are hired guns…
There was one “journalist” for the New York Times that reviewed cars, and he could never say anything positive about EVs - even to the point of warming consumers of the gloom that is EV. But after digging into his history, it was found he also published a lot of positive fluff pieces for the oil industry lol!
That car looks so unhappy :|
They are basically the embodiment of the fact that sites and organizations don't matter, but individuals do. I think the overwhelming majority of everything on Ars is garbage. But on the other hand they also run Eric Berger's space column [1] which is certainly one of the best ones out there. So don't ignore those names on tops of articles. If you find something informative, well sourced, and so on - there's a good chance most their other writing is of a similar standard.
Somehow, you picked the least credible Ars staffer to me.
Gina on LH is probably the best example.
Ah, and here my problem with Eric is he basically never criticizes Elon and only calls him "controversial". He's just a Musk mouthpiece at this point.
Ars is already a anti-Elon echo chamber. I stopped paying my subscription after a moderator endorsed a commenter issuing a (almost certainly empty) death threat to Elon.
I think death threats are a bit too far.
But in that environment I have to applause Eric for sticking to the technical and not giving in to the angry mob think that surrounds him. A true tech journalist with integrity.
A mouth piece would be lauding Elon where uncalled for. I've never seen him do that, but feel free to prove me wrong!
Imo Eric Berger and Beth Mole are the only parts of ars worth a damn anymore. If they started their own blog I would be happy to pay a subscription to them
Musk illegally impounded funds resulting in about 800,000 deaths a year for the foreseeable future. It does tend to make one angry.
Yes, but that’s indirect violence, we’re fine with that. Calling for someone’s death directly - as in, by name, and not via a complicated policy recommendation? Well, that’s just rude.
I'm not saying he's a great guy, I'm saying death threats are a bridge too far, especially for professional journalists.
Copium too much?
What would you do if you loved space as much as he does? There are no other heroes to cheer for
Or many other sources. If you’re writing about Space, you kinda need to cover SpaceX. If you’re opening critical of everything the owner says, pretty soon you won’t have any sources at SpaceX to give you the insights you need to do your job. I get the impression that the space field is pretty small, so you might not want to burn too many bridges.
Also, mission lengths can cover decades. In this case, it might be best to have a short memory when the story has a long time horizon.
This is even more true when politics has a rather short time horizon. Musk decided to jump into public politics at a time when the nation is substantially more divided and radicalized than it's been in living memory for most of us, to say nothing of being fueled by a media that's descended into nothing but endless hyper partisan yellow journalism. It's not really a surprise that things didn't work out great. But as the 'affected' move on to new people and new controversies, perspectives will moderate and normalize over time.
And, with any luck, Elon can get back to what he does well and we can get men back on the Moon and then on Mars in the not so distant future.
I think the fact that they one of the last places surviving from that generation of the Internet says a lot. The Condé Nast acquisition may have been a tragedy, but they managed to survive for this long. They’ve been continuously publishing online for about 30 years. It’s honestly amazing that they’ve managed to last this long.
Yes, it’s very different than it was back in the day. You don’t see 20+ page reviews of operating systems anymore, but I still think it’s a worthwhile place to visit.
Trying to survive in this online media market has definitely taken a toll. This current mistake makes me sad.
Their review of MacOS 26 is 79 pages when downloaded as a pdf, so they still sometimes have in depth articles. But I agree that that level of detail isn’t as common as in the past.
100% agree. I still have Ars Technica and Slashdot in my RSS feed list, but both are paused. Every now and then (maybe once a month) I'll take a peek, but it's rare that I'll find anything really worthwhile. About 10% of the content is slanted to push their desired narratives, so objectivity is gone.
Everyone's dancing around the problem. People refuse to pay the cost of producing high quality news. Advertising doesn't come close to cutting it.
You can see a new generation of media that charge subscribers enough to make a modest profit, and it's things like Talking Points Memo ($70 base cost per year), Defector ($70 or $80 I think), The Information ($500), 404 ($100), etc.
ArsTechnica has had subscriber tiers for quite a while. I am one. I’m not sure how many people subscribe or what their numbers look like, but I’d hope that Ars will be able to still be able to keep going in whatever the new media market looks like.
Josh at TPM has actually been quite open/vocal about how to run a successful (mildly profitable) media site in the current market. I think we are seeing transitions towards more subscriber based sites (more like the magazine model, now that I think about it). See The Verge as a more recent example.
A tragedy, yes. I can't be the only old fart around here with fond memories of John Siracusa's macOS ("OS X") reviews & Jon "Hannibal" Stokes' deep dives in CPU microarchitectures...
John Siracusa's macOS reviews were so in-depth people even published reviews of his reviews.
Certainly not the only old fart ‘round these parts.
Your comment reminded me of Dr Dobbs Journal for some reason.
Dr Dobbs was pretty good until almost the end, no? If memory serves me well, I recall the magazine got thinner and more sparse towards the end, but still high signal-to-noise ratio. Quite the opposite of Ars T.
Huge debt of gratitude to DDJ. I remember taking the bus to the capital every month just to buy the magazine on the newsstand.
I would go to the library on my bicycle to scour for a new copy of DDJ as a 10 year old.
I had dreams of someday meeting “Dr. Dobbs.” Of course, that was back in the day when Microsoft mailed me a free Windows SDK with printed manuals when I sent them a letter asking them how to write Windows programs, complete with a note from somebody important (maybe Ballmer) wishing me luck programming for Windows. Wish I’d kept it.
Anyone remember "Compute!"? I still have (mostly) fond memories of typing in games in Basic.
Actually, bugs in those listings were my first bug-hunts as a kid.
Compute!, Dr. Dobb’s, Kilobaud Microcomputing, Byte. Good magazines that are missed.
I finally subscribed to Dr. Dobbs for the Michael Abrash graphics articles, about a month before he ended them.
> publishing articles that are 90% press material from some company and most of the times seems to have very little technical knowledge.
Unfortunately, this is my impression as well.
I really miss Anandtech's reporting, especially their deep dives and performance testing for new core designs.
The main problem with technology coverage is you have one of 3 types of writers in the space:
1. Prosumer/enthusiasts who are somewhat technical, but mostly excitement
2. People who have professional level skills and also enjoy writing about it
3. Companies who write things because they sell things
A lot of sites are in category 1 - mostly excitement/enthusiasm, and feels.
Anandtech, TechReport, and to some extent Arstechnica (specially John Siracusa's OS X reviews) are the rare category 2.
Category 3 are things like the Puget Systems blog where they benchmark hardware, but also sell it, and it functions more as a buyer information.
The problem is that category 2 is that they can fairly easily get jobs in industry that pay way more than writing for a website. I'd imagine that when Anand joined Apple, this was likely the case, and if so that makes total sense.
When Andrei Frumusanu left Anandtech for Qualcomm, I'm sure he was paid much more for engineering chips than he was for writing about them, but his insight into the various core designs released for desktops and mobile was head and shoulders above anything I've seen since.
It's a shame that I can't even find a publication that runs and publishes the SPEC benchmarks on new core designs now that he is gone, despite SPEC having been the gold standard of performance comparison between dissimilar cores for decades.
> Ars writers used to be actual experts, sometimes even phd level, on technical fields. And they used to write fantastical and very informative articles. Who is left now?
What places on the internet remains where articles are written by actual experts? I know only of a few, and they get fewer every year.
https://theconversation.com/us/who-we-are is one of my favorites. Global academics writing about their research when something happens in the world or when they are published in a journal.
One other thing people might like about the conversation is that it has a bunch of regional subsections so it isn't overrun by US news like a lot of news sites. Well outside the US section of course. I know I personally appreciate having another source of informed writting that also covers local factors and events.
That may be for the technology and science sections. But the politics section is clearly pushing an agenda with regard to the current US administration - even though it is an agenda many people online might agree with. That section is not global, it is US-centric, and it heavily favours the popular side of the issue.
You prefer a "both sides" style of political coverage?
At what point in the slide to authoritarianism should that stop? Where is the line?
I like this aphorism someone once stated on bothsides-ism: When an arson burns down your home you don't pause to consider their side of the situation. Standing up to a bully doesn't mean the bully is being treated unfairly. They're just not accustomed to pushback on their BS and quickly don the caul of victimhood whenever their position is exposed.
Thank you.
This is exactly why us Israelis recoil at the anti-Israel demonstrations after October 7th. How the social media platforms were leveraged to promote the bully was a wake up call that we hadn't seen since 1938.
This comment is surely satire?
What are you talking about? This had absolutely nothing to do with Israel until you injected that.
Or the other side of at what point into ending capitalism in favor of socialism should that stop?
Yes, I enjoy "both sides" coverage when it's done in earnest. What passes for that today is two people representing the extremes of either spectrum looking for gotcha moments as an "owning" moment. We haven't seen a good "both sides" in decades
I see the capitalism vs socialism as a spectrum with valid debate all along it.
I don't see how one honestly argues in favor of an authoritarian government
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Ahh, you must be using the rational definition of socialism and not the extremist corrupted use as cover for dictators.
Odd, the Conversation has a version from France (that covers French news), Canada (that covers Canadian news), an African version (that…get this covers African news) and many other editions. I can’t shake the feeling that you just have an axe to grind and that axe is such a huge part of your identity that you’ll change facts to fit your chosen narrative. And you know, that’s very sad - we have these amazing cerebral cortexes and are capable of so much more.
i don't think these are as contradictory as you make them out to be
I'm not pointing out a contradiction. I am pointing out that this site - which otherwise seems great - it heavily promoting the popular-online side of a very controversial subject.
It looks like they know how to grow an audience at the expense of discourse, because those adherent to the popular-online side will heavily attack all publications that discuss the other side. Recognising this, it is hard to seriously consider their impartiality in other fields. It's very much the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect.
"Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know."
-Michael Crichton
That’s interesting to me because my trust in Consumer Reports was heavily eroded when I read a review on computer printers that was basically all wrong and wondered if any of there other reviews could possibly be trusted.
Consumer reports is really good at following their methodology, but you really need to read and understand their methodology, because it's often completely worthless.
A perfect example is toilets - I don't care at all how well a toilet flushes golfballs, because I never flush golfballs.
> - it heavily promoting the popular-online side of a very controversial subject
Any specific examples? I took a quick browse but didn't find anything that fit what you're talking about, and what you're saying is a bit vague (maybe because I'm not from the US). Could you link a specific article and then tell us what exactly is wrong?
I'm not from the US either, but I see much vitriol against their current president and his policies. And not a single article in support.
I really hope _this_ quote is not fabricated - because what a fantastic quote!!
Aren't they all making YouTube videos now? It's basically the best place to get paid for making expert content.
The Register? :)
techbriefs, photonics spectra, photonics focus, EAA Sport Aviation? I don't think it's going to be anything super popular, to become popular you have to appeal to a broad audience. But in niches there is certainly very high quality material. It also won't be (completely) funded by advertising.
lwn.net?
The London review of Books frequently has domain experts writing their reviews.
> What places on the internet remains where articles are written by actual experts?
The personal blogs of experts.
Examples? :)
First one that comes to mind is https://morethanmoore.substack.com/
Run by a Dr. Ian Cutress. Never heard about before, seems to describe themselves like this:
> Industry Analyst, More Than Moore. Youtube Influencer and Educator.
Seems they're one example of the sad trend of people going from being experts and instead diving into "influencing" instead, which comes with a massive list of drawbacks.
Ian wrote a lot of in-depth technical reviews and articles at Anandtech. He’s not a nobody.
https://archive.is/2022.02.18-161603/https://www.anandtech.c...
Damn, for someone asking specifically for experts with blogs, you sure have harsh opinion of experts with blogs!
https://www.404media.co/ I subscribe
It's worse than that, Condé Nast is owned by Advance Publications.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Advance_subsidiaries
They own a depressing number of "local" newspapers to project excessive influence.
I used to read it daily. Even continued for a few years after the acquisition. But at this point, I haven't looked at it in years. Even tend to skip the articles that make it to the first page of HN. Of course, most of the original writers I still follow on social media, and some have started their own Substack publications.
I presume you meant "fantastic," not "fantastical"?
I think fantastical isn’t totally inaccurate, and I’m not being snarky (for once). The personal observations and sometimes colorful language has been something I like about Ars. Benj in particular, with his warm tributes to BBSes. Or Jim Salter’s very human networking articles. The best stuff on Ars is both technically sound and rich with human experience. “Fantastical” taken to mean something like, capturing the thrills and aspirations that emerge from our contact with technology, seems fair I think.
I’ll be interested in finding out more about just what the hell happened here. I hardly think of Benj or Kyle as AI cowboy hacks, something doesn’t add up
“Fantastical” means based on fantasy: not real. A fantastical journalism source is one filled with lies.
You seem to think it means “extra fantastic.” Not correct.
Wanted to comment the same. Parent poster might not be aware that “fantastical” means “fantasy”.
But I think we do get his point regardless :)
It's funny because I assume "fantastical" was invented so people could still express the true meaning of fantastic, ie. a piece of fantasy.
I confess I find the growing prevalence of these sorts of errors on HN dispiriting. Programming requires precision in code; I’d argue software engineering requires precision in language, because it involves communicating effectively with people.
In any single instance I don’t get very exercised - we tend to be able to infer what someone means. But the sheer volume of these malapropisms tells me people are losing their grip on our primary form of communication.
Proper dictionaries should be bundled free with smartphones. Apple even has some sort of license as you can pull up definitions via context menus. But a standalone dictionary app you must obtain on your own. (I have but most people will not.)
Jesus christ man, you are pulling out a lot from a single typo, eh? English is just not my first language (and not the last either). Having an accent or the occasional misspelling on some forum has never impacted me professionally.
I got very tired of seeing the same video thumbnails over and over.
It seemed like at some point they were pushing into video, of which there were some good ones they put out, but then they stopped. They kept the video links in the articles but since there are only a handful you'll just see the same ones over and over.
I've probably seen the first 3 or 4 seconds of the one with the Dead Space guy about a hundred times now.
> what's the business with those weirdly formatted articles from wired?
You must have missed the 90's Wired magazine era with magenta text on a striped background and other goofiness. Weird formatting is their thing.
> they used to write fantastical and very informative articles
> Still a very good website
These are indeed quite controversial opinions on ars.
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I got banned for calling out the shilling back right after the acquisition. Apparently that was a personal attack on the quality of the author. It's gone downhill from there. I used to visit it every day, now I mostly forget it exists
Yeah, I was very active on the ars forums back in the day, and after the buyout things initially were ok, but started go do down hill pretty clearly once the old guard of authors started leaving.
It's a shame because the old ars had a surprisingly good signal to noise ratio vs other big sites of that era.
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> the acquisition from Condé Nast
By Condé Nast? Or did they get acquired again?
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Well I am calling out an entire class of journalist. Every time I've made a similar statement I got some angry answer (or got my post hidden or removed).