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Ask HN: What happened to theregister.com?
Asking here because I think there is probably a lot of overlap and maybe some knowledgeable insiders.
I used to visit The Register almost every day up until a few years ago. Back then, it was famous for its punny headlines, tongue-in-cheek reporting style, and all in all being a self-identified IT tabloid.
I visited it again a week or two ago, and it seems to have dropped the humourous tone and intentionally-obscure headlines, to become just one more samey IT news page.
Does anybody know what caused this transformation? Has it been acquired by a conglomerate or something? The nearest thing I've found is that its original Chief Editor left in May 2019...
- quickthrower2 4y agoExample of the previous editorial style: https://web.archive.org/web/20190410065314/https://www.theregister.co.uk/ https://web.archive.org/web/20190410065314/https://www.there...
- taffronaut 4y agoThat's a real contrast. The current site is a shadow of its former self. The new stuff doesn't even seem to be paid-for placement - just lame outsourced copy.
- robertlagrant 4y agoEverything, good or bad, regresses to the mean.
- quickthrower2 4y agoBean counters have taken over. Ad in front of geek = $1 / 1000 impression. Ad in front of CTO = $10 / 1000 impressions. Then milk the cow, get the investment back and move on. Anyway https://www.theonion.com/ https://www.theonion.com/ https://www.betootaadvocate.com/ https://www.betootaadvocate.com/ Hopefully http://n-gate.com/ http://n-gate.com/ gets going again. (Type out the url, he detects HN redirects).
- hansel_der 4y ago> Type out the url, he detects HN redirects referer actually
- quickthrower2 4y agoThanks… referer is what I really meant
- BurnerBouy 4y agoAn actual example of the previous editorial style: https://web.archive.org/web/20050428082501/http://www.theregister.co.uk/ https://web.archive.org/web/20050428082501/http://www.thereg...
- antisthenes 4y agoBland tabloid then, and bland tabloid now. What changed? I really don't see much of a difference
- xtracto 4y agoI don't know... for me, who read it in the mid 2000s it was kind of like reading the "Big Issue" or the "Metro" in the UK: Sometimes I wanted to read low thinking tabloid funny news. The Register was great for that. Nowadays it is Yet Another Technology Website.
- quickthrower2 4y agoFrom the link: "Rust never sleeps: C++-alike language tops Stack Overflow survey for fourth year in a row" The tongue was a bit more in cheek before I guess
- gjsman-1000 4y agoNot sure, but my theory is that Google SEO had to do with it after Google tried to remove false or misleading headlines around the election and afterwards. At the time (and still somewhat now), satire was/is often quite lost on Google. This presumably hurt ad revenues.
- bryanlarsen 4y agoMike Magee was co founder of the Register and established its style. He left in 2001, and the Register has been declining ever since.
- krmboya 4y agoDeclining since 2001! That must be such a glacial decline
- chasil 4y agoI believe he then started the inquirer.net which ran for another decade. I remember them occasionally featuring a fragment of a poem by Alexander Pope: "Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer, And without sneering, teach the rest to sneer." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damning_with_faint_praise https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damning_with_faint_praise
- rozab 4y agoTo see this gloriously realised, check out CGP Grey's description of Pope's feud with Thomas Hearne. Linking the full video because it's a masterpiece https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEV9qoup2mQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEV9qoup2mQ
- chasil 4y agoBy some strange coincidence, I had decided this week to read Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's and then watch the film again. I might also repeat a famous Wilde quote: There are two ways to dislike poetry. One is to dislike it, and the other is to read Pope.
- Justin_K 4y agoI really felt that when Larry the janitor left in 1998 is when the decline started.
- csa 4y agoI miss Larry. Backbone of the org.
- traceroute66 4y agoI agree, El Reg is a shadow of its former self. There has been a decline in quality with obvious errors caused by poor research or rushed publishing. There has been an increase in sponsored copy, and also a marked hardening of its already notorious Apple bashing. There have also been a number of occasions where they've simply missed reporting on important topics altogether. Also on their forums, there has been a decline in quality of contributions. For a while it still used to be worth going to El Reg just to read the forums, but even that is becoming increasingly pointless.
- return_to_monke 4y agoIf we are on the topic, could someone suggest some sites with a similar style and topic?
- bxparks 4y agoFunny enough, I stopped reading the Register after a few attempts because I disliked its headlines and tone. "To each his own" I guess.
- rwmj 4y agoYou have to see it in the context of British tabloids (mass-readership, low-brow newspapers), especially of the 80s and 90s. The Register was emulating this style of irreverant journalism. For example have a look at some Sun headlines: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/3654446.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/3654446.stm
- CommieBobDole 4y agoYeah, that's exactly why I never really got into the site; I got the joke, it just seemed weirdly awkward and off-putting, like having a coworker who talks like a pirate all day, every day. It's funny at first, but it drives you crazy after a while.
- asddubs 4y agoif they do it long and consistently enough i think i would oscillate between finding it funny and driving me crazy
- ghaff 4y agoAnd particularly if you were on the receiving end of a bit of excessive snark you sort of ended up having to talk people down that it's just The Reg being The Reg. And, of course, if you follow that style, you will overdo it not infrequently. I could name a few people on Twitter like that. It can be funny but it can also get in the way of serious points you want to make.
- runxel 4y agoFunny enough, as a person whose native language is not English, The Register always went above my head. I knew it was meant to be snarky or funny, but it always left me stumbling and I never was quite sure if not the whole page was just an elaborate shitjoke.
- LorenDB 4y agoWhen I saw this, I thought "probably about the changing of the header to black instead of red" (presumably due to Queen Elizabeth's death?).
- bennyp101 4y agoI used to visit it everyday from the early 2000's, but I don't think I have really visited in the last 3-4 years. I can't put a finger on it, but the writing and then subsequently the comments (which were always fun) kinda started falling off. I still have it in my bookmark bar, but as I still cant get the favicon to load properly in Firefox, I forget to click on it :)
- josefresco 4y agoSame here. Used to be a daily for me, then for some reason I dropped it and completely forgot about it until this post. Maybe around the time Digg imploded? I'm not sure.
- speedbird 4y agoSame. Used to really like some of the old stuff, like Lewis’s, but these days I only visit if an item is linked from here.
- Angostura 4y agoAh, Lewis’ old diatribes about how climate change was trash.
- nickdothutton 4y agoNo-longer “biting the hand that feeds IT”.
- donaldihunter 4y agoIt still has this slogan in the page footer.
- NKosmatos 4y agoYeap, I agree. I've been reading technological news from El Reg since around 2000 and their writing style has changed a lot, it's not as humorous as it used to be. Once of the only reasons to visit them nowadays is for the BOFH (new episode every Friday): https://www.theregister.com/offbeat/bofh/ https://www.theregister.com/offbeat/bofh/
- hn_go_brrrrr 4y agoBOFH hasn't been every week since the mid-00s. I wish it were!
- trelane 4y agoEh, there's only so much of that to be had. At some point, it becomes formulaic.
- r6752366a 4y agoVerity Stob was my reason for visiting: https://www.theregister.com/Author/Verity-Stob/ https://www.theregister.com/Author/Verity-Stob/
- jamal-kumar 4y agoDidn't they make some grand announcement about shutting down a few years ago? I can see how someone might not allow that to happen and then just milk the thing.
- diodesign 4y agoYou're probably thinking of TheInquirer.net, which was founded by a co-founder of The Register, and shut down in the past few years. C.
- secondcoming 4y agoIt hasn't been the same since around the time Andrew Orlowski left. The politics (identity and anti-Trump reddit-style) stuff crept in too, especially from its San Fran office, but you could obviously just choose to ignore those articles. It's not something I want from a tech site though. It's a shame, ElReg and Slashdot used be my go-to site for tech content.
- gandalfian 4y agoWeirder is what happened to its successor theinquirer.net? It was bought and then erased. Who does that? Was it a copyright thing? Otherwise theregister hit that brief window between professional magazine publishing and every teenager with a phone becoming a tech blogger, the brief window when website publishing was cheap but not yet overcrowded.
- dylan604 4y agoif someone's website was "stealing" traffic from your website, then purchasing the offending site and shutting it down would be business move to eliminate competition.
- adrianwaj 4y agoI think you may be right. TheInquirer's shutdown screen in 2019 mentioned that it started in 2006, when really it started in 2001. So whoever shut it down was either ignorant of how/when it began or they wanted to mislead about the early days. See here: https://web.archive.org/web/20200331234933/https://www.theinquirer.net/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200331234933/https://www.thein... https://i.imgur.com/hqh9aTe.jpg https://i.imgur.com/hqh9aTe.jpg (shutdown screen) https://web.archive.org/web/20010405023100/http://www.theinquirer.net:80/ https://web.archive.org/web/20010405023100/http://www.theinq... (2001)
- BMc2020 4y agodigg dot com, metafilter dot com, reddit dot com, craigslist dot com - all still around but I no longer go to them because they have changed so much.
- jacooper 4y agoPersonally I have just discovered the Register this year, and I like them a lot. I have seen how the old style was, yes it different, but I wouldn't say its a run of the mill IT website. Its reporting is pretty good, and they have good opinion pieces, like intel optane possible revolution for IT(1), tracking obfuscation by big tech (2) and safari WebKit limiting mobile web (3) articles. 1. https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/01/optane_intel_cancellation/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/01/optane_intel_cancella... 2. https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/23/opinion_column/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/23/opinion_column/ 3. https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/06/big_techs_big_privacy_heist/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/06/big_techs_big_privacy... There are other website like InfoWorld, which produced articles like how docker broke in half, however their website is annoying, and in general less focus on FOSS/Linux. https://www.infoworld.com/article/3632142/how-docker-broke-in-half.html https://www.infoworld.com/article/3632142/how-docker-broke-i...
- GGSec 4y ago
- InCityDreams 4y ago"It's crept back onto my lists recently" Wrists (line 1), or you did actually mean 'lists'? ...given the '....suicide headlines'. ?
- oxff 4y agoIt is like reading articles made by language model.
- Andwalle 4y agoAndrew Orlowski! He writes for the Daily Telegraph, which is the UKs equivalent of Fox News. Everything is uphill from there
- jen20 4y agoThe Sun is the UK equivalent of Fox News.
- BurnerBouy 4y agoYou've never the Telegraph
- Veen 4y agoThe Telegraph is nothing like Fox News, except insofar as it is a center-right publication. The tone, quality, and perspective are utterly different.
- MandieD 4y agoThe Telegraph is more like the Wall Street Journal, yet another Murdoch-owned media property. The Daily Express is like Fox News.
- NGRhodes 4y agoThey had a great formula. Used to get some good scoop, a humorous spin whilst having a decent level of factual accuracy. Sadly, they now need to compete with social media and memes, the newer generations of internet user treat websites as a secondary source of news and entertainment.
- rvbissell 4y agoSo their solution to that shift in their market is to become more stodgy?
- johnklos 4y agoI noticed the change right around the time they stopped having a distinct landing page for "theregister.co.uk", which I preferred because of their slightly more provincial bent, and instead started redirecting everyone, everywhere to "theregister.com". It's sad, because much of its appeal was precisely how different they were from common IT coverage that was and still is mostly written for non-IT types.
- rseech01 4y agoThe Register used to be required reading for BOFH. More oriented to folks in the UK, but I used to enjoy this series. If you have some time to kill check out some of the articles.
- jasonlotito 4y ago> Does anybody know what caused this transformation? Maybe this? > I used to visit The Register almost every day up until a few years ago. Years of not going > I visited it again a week or two ago,
- donpott 4y agoDo you mean that the "old" style didn't make it commercially viable, and the "new" one does? I would disagree. At least before I would visit it intermittently whenever I remembered it existed. Now I have zero interest in ever visiting it again.
- jasonlotito 4y agoYou disagree, but even you admit that the old style was something you rarely, if ever, visited. So, when they try to determine what their users enjoy, what you enjoy won't get counted as much. > Now I have zero interest in ever visiting it again. You barely had any interest in visiting in the first place. You don't build a commercially viable product by catering to people who routinely do not use you. You can disagree, but again, you didn't visit for years at a time, so it doesn't matter.
- donpott 4y agoThat's a fair point. I'm finding the thread interesting because it has helped divorce my personal experience from (some of) the english-speaking tech community at large. For me, a theme that's arising is that the previous style was pretty polarising, but at the same time it was a differentiator. Now, it's neither of those. It appears that this works better for them commercially, too; so more power to them.
- JaceLightning 4y agoHuh. Never heard of There Gister.com before
- crackercrews 4y agoMaybe you'd recognize the original domain, There Gister.co.uk?
- JaceLightning 4y agoAhh a that's probably it
- no-dr-onboard 4y agoSad to see it turn this way. Now if we want to tounge-in-cheek tech humour, we are left with. . . techdirt.com?
- iso1631 4y agoOh, interesting, I might have to start reading it. I used to read it back in the late 90s and early 00s but the tabloid style put me off (I assume this is the .com is the same as theregister.co.uk -- the place that bought BOFH etc)
- diodesign 4y agoHello, I'm Chris Williams, the editor of The Register. Maybe I can answer some of these Qs. > what caused this transformation? All things have to evolve and move with the times. As you've said, we were known, for example, for "intentionally-obscure headlines." Guess what, that works for some people - and it was fun - but it was holding us back reaching many more people, not just from the headline tone but also aggregation and sharing. And I want our original, technical, and best coverage seen by as many folks as possible. The Reg has been going for 20+ years. We have to keep up with what people want. And yes, some people liked the 2010s era, some missed the 2000s era, but also many more thought we weren't taking journalism seriously. We do take it seriously (we don't take ourselves too seriously) and I'd hate for headlines to hold that back. What's really changed is that we've styled the main headlines to be more accessible in every way, and still keep our sardonic, informed voice in stories and sub-headlines. We have a mix of core IT stories; software and open source; where life meets tech; science; and more, written in a way that gives our tech readers a voice. If you haven't read us in a while, then yes, we've changed visibly. If you've been reading us for more than a year or two, the change will have been fairly gradual as we tune our headlines to match what people expect from an irreverent technical title. > Has it been acquired by a conglomerate? No, it's still independently owned, with owners who give editorial free rein. It's documented in UK Companies House. > its original Chief Editor left in May 2019 No, you're thinking of an executive editor who left around then, who wasn't in a management position (think editor-at-large). C.
- cesaref 4y agoIt certainly had an unconventional approach, which was considered a tabloid style (similar to the 'red top' newspapers in the UK, the sun, the mirror etc) I believe Mike Magee who was one of the founders was responsible for this, and he was involved until he fell out with the direction it was going in the early 2000s, and went on to form The Inquirer, which was a similar publication (although long gone). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Magee_(journalist) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Magee_(journalist) I guess over time The Register has morphed to try and be taken more seriously (in I imagine a rather competitive market), it hides it's original tagline - biting the hand that feeds IT
- nmeofthestate 4y agoI was never a fan of the Register's IMO smug, smart-alec English IT guy "voice".
- Bakary 4y agoThere's so much American-centric content in the anglo internet that literally anything else is most welcome
- WesolyKubeczek 4y agoThose punny headlines have been annoying me.
- randombits0 4y agoI still have the vulture t-shirt with the tag line, “Biting the hand that feeds IT!”. For me the FQDN will always be www.theregister.co.uk.
- franze 4y agoSEO happened
- Andwalle 4y agoWhat happened to ZDNEt is the question isn't it?
- bell-cot 4y agoWhile Vulture Classic's (the old style's) sardonic 'tude was not always implemented well, it was a very welcome alternative to the mainstream's Sisyphean treadmill of "$VendorName $ProductName $NewVersionNumber Is New And Improved Yet Again!". Their 'tude let you at least pretend that their journalists weren't sock puppets for the industry heavyweights, and the headlines certainly made reading the news a bit more fun. Looking for some upside - Vulture Classic was pretty alcoholic and misogynistic - two features which I found rather unattractive.
- gumby 4y agoIn 20 years el Reg has had several, well incarnations is too strong a word, but let's just say its nature has evolved. I think this is is pretty much the nature of any organization. The Lester Haines era (https://www.theregister.com/2016/06/16/lester_haines_obituary/ https://www.theregister.com/2016/06/16/lester_haines_obituar... ) was quite good -- I think his presence must have inspired others to creativity and lunacy in their prose. Orlowski was really really good but you can't do the same thing forever. FWIW, lately I feel like it's been on an uptick. Let's compare it to google which had a burst of activity and even inspiration at first and then lost its way after Schmidt stopped being CEO. OK, El Reg isn't one of the largest corporations in the world (well, at least they won't admit it and hide it well) but on this dimension I think it's done better than Google.
- sn0w_monkie 4y agoChurnalism as an industry is very broken sadly T_T. Advertisers want to see engagement and the easiest way to do that is to suck up to Google SEO and pump more articles on the daily. Original and accurate reporting is expensive to produce. Only the biggest publishers or ones that are well funded can afford to do this. So in order to get the reader's eyeballs and clicks, the guys in the middle and bottom tiers have to crank out news and end up rehashing what has already been broken by bigger orgs. That's why The Register mostly looks like any other mediocre tech site now. I know someone who used to be a reporter and they got tired of having to rewrite stories for little pay.
- _8j50 4y agoTheguardian and bbc also redirect me to their US .com these days when I explicitly go to their .co.uk looking for news tailored to the UK because of my geoip.
- xena 4y agoIt probably certainly doesn't help that they hire editors that feel the need to compare people's chosen professional names to mercenary groups.
- davidwritesbugs 4y agoAt least they've dropped that fuckwit Andrew Orlowski.