If I understand the root comment correctly, here's my 2c.
Ars used to be the premiere tech news website, focused on tech instead of things like society and politics.
After it was acquired by conde Nast (owner of wired) many think there has been a steady drop in quality of writing on that website, and a move away from tech towards political things, similar to Wired.
I'm not sure if I'd attribute the drop in quality to conde Nast or just a general trend in websites getting more popular (e.g. Reddit), but I think it's there.
Honestly, ars technica is "kind of a raging dumpster fire." Over the past few years I've watched them transform from producing measured, interesting, informative articles to producing politics-laden "reactionary youth" idiocy, akin to Vox or Mic. Another one bites the dust, I guess.
I'm still following Ars Technica on Facebook, but it's only clickbait these days. I feel like I remember it being a quality publication at some point in the past ... What happened?
I see Ars Technica taking a lot of flak in the comments but lawdy, they’re still pretty great and one of the news sources I actually pay for (full-text rss feeds are a nice bonus).
Just to pick a few of their writers who still kill it: Lee Hutchinson for anything sysadmin related, Eric Berger does the best space/rocket coverage on the entire internet, Jonathan Gitlin does a ton of in-depth automotive coverage and his passion for it bleeds through in every article, Andrew Cunningham’s insane macOS reviews that he took over from John Siracusa. I could go on but would basically be copy-pasting from their staff directory…
Sounded odd to me, too, so I checked. Conde Nast since 2008, privately owned until then, per Wikipedia.
I think it's optimistic to suggest that Ars Technica, a site with no qualms publishing e.g. a great big steaming pile of baseless AI scaremongering under a banner photo of a movie Terminator, is concerned that being under the same umbrella as a snake oil peddler might damage its brand.
What other purpose might the mobilization of your contempt at this time serve?
Arstechnica isn't a good source of information since 10 years or so. It had some really good reads before but quality already got worse. But at some point it plummeted to blatant lies and partisan idiocy I probably cannot really understand as a non-American.
Didn't Ars get bought by same corporate parent (Conde Naste) as Wired? While Ars hasn't sunk quite as quickly, its still not nearly as good as it was pre-acquisition for me.
It's popularity stems from its early significance; Ars is an old, old website by standards of peers like The Verge and it did used to have much more frequent high quality technical writing. Since Conde acquisition it's definitely veered more mainstream (exactly like Wired did too) IMO. I certainly don't think the original Ars crowd imagined they'd one day be a Conde Naste "brand".
Well there are signs. There have been less in depth articles in the past years.
And they have started pulling in the occasional Wired article, most of the time digital security fearmongering with zero to negative value. They're clearly marked as Wired on the front page now, I think because people complained, but I'm guessing Conde Nast is forcing them to keep pulling them, which is worrying.
Arstechnica hasn't been all that great for a long time now, largely since Conde Nast bought it over. In my opinion anyway its glory days are long behind it now. I dropped it from my reading list several years ago. This article is especially egregious.
The era of writers like co-founder Jon Stokes on the site is long gone; his last contribution was in 2011, No more Siracusa articles since 2014, etc etc.
Their comment section since last year has devolved into Reddit style one-liners (especially political articles). The articles are really average these days.
The one I'm really worried about is Anandtech, the articles are still excellent but they're so understaffed(A10 chip deep dive was canceled, behind on Mac reviews)
"Oh well, there goes another outlet. They can all do this, I don't care. Just won't read their content. Eventually there won't be any good non-paywalled content left, and I'll just figure something else out."
It reeks of desperation on their part - no good options left for their business or their business model.
That being said, while I will not miss wired.com at all, I will miss a site like arstechnica and would hate to think they are in the same boat ...
Presumably, given the even higher level of technical acumen among their readers, ars might be in an even worse situation.
Same thing happened with Engadget and Gizmodo. Used to absolutely love reading them on a daily basis, product reviews were always super technical and a bit off the wall, it had that hackaday-type vibe.
Now they are a spammy lowest-common-denominator pop culture “tech news” and cell phone reviews.
They wrote some article about Eric Schmit being a sexist asshole the other day (maybe yesterday) and low and behold the senior editor was talking trash to people in the comments section. It was a flimsy terrible article that I honestly felt contributed nothing to tech journalism on one side, or diversity and women's inclusion on the other. It was almost as if they wrote it to pick a bone with their readers and then battle it out over the blowback. Sometimes I honestly cannot stand that website.
I'm wondering if it has something to do with Condé Nast, because WIRED isn't doing too great either in that regard.
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