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Extremely sad. There basically is nothing like Anandtech; the depth, the ability to explain, the lack of sensationalism, and the integrity in benchmarking (I st

Extremely sad. There basically is nothing like Anandtech; the depth, the ability to explain, the lack of sensationalism, and the integrity in benchmarking (I still vividly remember when they noticed an issue with HPET in Windows affecting their benchmarks, and promptly pulled all of them offline until they could reassess). Chips and Cheese is great but only covers a certain segment of it. In the end, I would assume it just boiled down to lack of money. There were people among us who would gladly pay for this kind of coverage, but Anandtech said at some point they had considered it and couldn't find a good model. (As an aside, I pay for LWN, and I would pay for something that covered similar areas to Phoronix but actually was good.)

a-french-anon 2y ago
Same. Paying for LWN but I get a bit annoyed when there's the lone Phoronix-tier clickbait about diversity amongst all the high quality kernel reports. Phoronix could get a lot better if it stopped clickbaiting (which attracts the most feebleminded parts of the peanuts nogrammer gallery in the comments) and labelled -> aggregated its benchmarks according to SIMD support/enablement, threading and type (CPU, GPGPU, 3D, etc...). And investigated strange issues in results instead of drowning readers in data. Basically, we need something in-between Phoronix and ChipsAndCheese for benchmarks. Also reading Igor's Lab and GamerNexus when I want some data about hardware, but it's Windows focused, sadly.
- phoronixrly 2y ago
  At this point I suspect if Phoronix suddenly takes a turn and stops being clickbait blogspam, it would be alienating its core audience... People that love to read ragebait and argue aimlessly in the comments.
- Sesse__ 2y ago
  > And investigated strange issues in results instead of drowning readers in data. The basic problem of Phoronix is that it doesn't have the capacity nor competence to do this. Journalism is expensive and takes time, and Phoronix is a single person. If they were to actually go in and investigate every strange issue they had in their benchmarks (assuming they even notice them!), or add reasonable commentary beyond the seemingly autogenerated “in benchmark X, device Y seems go be ahead”, they would have to cut the number of articles and benchmarks drastically. Kind of like Anandtech, really; one of my main gripes with it is that there just wasn't _enough_ of it per unit of time.
- pas 2y ago
  Diversity as a topic and problem space has became undeniably important though. Of course it's not an easy topic, does not really lend itself to the usual reporting methodology of LWN. I wholeheartedly agree that many times it is completely counterproductive to post/host content that tries and fails to engage with diversity, because - as you pointed out - even the mention of it gives that ugly sour taste when browsing a site. Yet the topic won't really lose its salience as long as the problems themselves are either "solved" or something crowds them out. I trust that the LWN editors are aware of this, and are not doing it for the clicks. So I think it's completely fair (more so necessary for progress) to critique bad takes on diversity, but I think it just leads to frustration to try to "wish it away".
  - steve-rambo-fan 2y ago
    Diversity of opinion and experience is extremely important. Not diversity of your bedroom preferences or any other superficial characteristics that have no relation to technical qualities. Saying otherwise is racist and *ist by definition. Comments on those articles always go down the shitter. I petitioned the editors to disable commenting on them, and you can do the same -- politely and humbly, of course. The contact information is on the website, whoever wants to, will find it easily.
    - Nullabillity 2y ago
      If a place somehow ends up only employing people wearing brown shirts, isn't that a bit odd?
- tredre3 2y ago
  > Phoronix could get a lot better if it stopped clickbaiting I've been reading Phoronix for years and I don't recall seeing clickbait. Most of the time the titles are just quotes from the sourced article he links to. Even skimming https://www.phoronix.com/news https://www.phoronix.com/news I see no clickbait? Was it something they did in the past? Or is the clickbait specific to benchmarks, which I have no ability to interpret?
  - BoingBoomTschak 2y ago
    https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linus-Torvalds-Bcachefs-Regrets https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linus-Torvalds-Bcachefs-Regret... clearly fabricating a juicy title by intentionally misinterpreting one of Linus' sentences. Just for the aforementioned peanut gallery watching two egos colliding like they would watch WWE. https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-Split-X.Org-Session https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-Split-X.Org-Session reporting about a pretty pointless change just to get that sweet Wayland/X11 drama driven flaming. Clickbaiting may have been the wrong word, there's not much of that, more "feeding drama to an audience he knows well" than anything. The comment section is almost Wccftech tier, these days.
spinningslate 2y ago
From TFA: > If anything, the need has increased as social media and changing advertising landscapes have made shallow, sensationalistic reporting all the more lucrative. And your comment: > There were people among us who would gladly pay for this kind of coverage It's Friday so I'm going to be optimistic. I'd like to think (maybe fantasise) that we've passed the low point of ad-fuelled, sensational, information-light, polarised, vacuous content. There are some promising shoots, from paid newsletters (e.g. stratechery plus [0]) to search (e.g. Kagi [1]). There are early signs that Browsers are coming back as a topic with Chrome's inexorable slide into increasingly obfuscated ways to slurp data [2] and the (very) early promise of e.g. ladybird [3] as the first genuinely new, ground-up browser for years. It's never going to be mainstream. As someone once wrote here, the economy is a machine that incessantly drives cost down. Orthodoxy says you can't get cheaper than free - but that presumes measuring cost solely in monetary terms. Widen the definition of "cost" though and what we have now is definitely not free: we pay with loss of privacy, social disfunction and mental health degradation among others. Challenging the commercial behemoths who benefit from the "free internet" myth is a massive task. Perhaps unassailable. If there's an upside, it's that the long tail - where quality, paid for content and services might thrive - is simultaneously meaningful enough to support a small but thriving industry, and small enough to be uninteresting to the 1000lb gorillas. That may be fantasy per above. But I'd rather cling to something hopeful. [0] https://stratechery.com/stratechery-plus/ https://stratechery.com/stratechery-plus/ [1] https://kagi.com/ https://kagi.com/ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41391412 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41391412 [3] https://ladybird.org/ https://ladybird.org/ -- EDIT: fixed grammar.
- wickedsight 2y ago
  > we've passed the low point of ad-fuelled, sensational, information-light, polarised, vacuous content I'm a bit more pessimistic I guess. Netflix at one point felt like the end of piracy, because it was becoming the portal to all great video content. Then everyone wanted a slice of the pie and started their own platform. Now, Netflix is starting to fill up with 'sensational, information-light, polarised, vacuous content' and they really seem to want to become ad-fuelled. I also dislike that I have to choose between giving up all my privacy to a ton of ad providers or needing 100 different subscriptions to get some good content. I kinda hope that Mozilla (or someone else) finds a way to become the Spotify/Netflix of the web. A place where I can pay a single fee that then gets distributed between the platforms and sites I visit. But I kinda know that that will never happen, since it gives too much power to that one platform. For a while I thought that blockchain/crypto might be a good way to fix this. But nobody seems to be building blockchain stuff to do the right thing, they only do it to rip people off.
Workaccount2 2y ago
>There were people among us who would gladly pay for this kind of coverage While strictly true, it almost certainly would only be a tiny fraction. Probably not far off from the small fraction that would visit their site without ad-blocking. I know people don't like hearing it, but the "I never want to see an advertisement again...and I don't have to" mentality that exists, especially within anandtechs tech minded demographic, does have material downsides. I'm not saying you shouldn't block ads, but I know 99% of you reading this have never whitelisted a single domain. Now crucify me for pulling a skeleton out of the closet.
- asaddhamani 2y ago
  If a site offers a reasonable priced alternative to ads I'll opt for that. I've donated at other times when that option is available. Otherwise I don't want to be tracked profusely. Ethics is sorely missing in online advertising.
  - zooq_ai 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - fmos 2y ago
      Ha, you're assuming GP visits Youtube. (I don't, rather in this camp: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41400286 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41400286 )
  - Workaccount2 2y ago
    This comment (not from you personally, Asad, but the idea of it) is the very core of the reason why I have such an axe to grind on this topic. One brings this ugly topic up, that ads keep sites running, and are showered by comments of people saying exactly what you said. Those comments get praise and lots of upvotes. Everyone pats themselves on the back. But when you are on the other side of the equation, the one dependent on ad views and/or subscriptions, the numbers unequivocally show that people are totally full of shit. That they are just virtue signalling to receive praise and to push the skeleton back in the closet. Again, not calling you out personally, I believe you do support creators. But I have done this song and dance many many times, and it always goes the same way.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
kzz102 2y ago
I kept thinking that Anandtech could have survived if they had not been part of a corporate ownership. Because they were owned by a media conglomerate, the pressure is on to behave more like other media business under the same ownership. They could have diversified in terms of revenue if they were independent.
awill 2y ago
but how do you explain AnandTech lasting so so long if the business model didn't work? I remember reading AnandTech >20 years ago. I think it failed now because they slowed down on releasing content. Over the last 2 years they've hardly published anything. They didn't even cover the latest iPhones (and when they did, it was months after release when no one cared anymore).
ksec 2y ago
I blame this on Future PLC. Not only their Ad model is worst of all the tech site, the tech layout and software for the site and posting articles were bad and I remember Ian complained about it multiple times. They could have at least focus on their core competency which is in-depth articles and explanations. Instead we now live in the world of rumours site like WCCftech, and Apple dominance in Tech circle since the iPhone means a lot of new ( relatively speaking ) tech readers are reading Macrumors and 9to5Mac as their tech new sources. Reporting things that those reporter dont understand and keep making fake rumours that makes absolutely no sense.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
mulderc 2y ago
I feel like something is very wrong when a publication the quality of AnandTech can't figure out a viable business model.
j45 2y ago
Very true. As much as we try to hope organizations might reinvent themselves or disrupt themselves for the future before something else does, they just provide a good service. I can't wonder if AnandTech had a substack angle it might have provided an option? Good, useful writing that teaches you how to look at, understand, use, or do something is invaluable. Creating beginners is everything in this world so they can progress.
hajile 2y ago
Chips and Cheese is Anandtech's spiritual successor and I think its patron model is probably better overall. https://chipsandcheese.com/ https://chipsandcheese.com/ David Kanter doesn't write articles very much these days, but Real World Tech has always had top-shelf stuff and it's one of the few places where all the comments are worth reading too. https://www.realworldtech.com/ https://www.realworldtech.com/
RickHull 2y ago
They should start a Substack

a-french-anon 2y ago

Same. Paying for LWN but I get a bit annoyed when there's the lone Phoronix-tier clickbait about diversity amongst all the high quality kernel reports. Phoronix could get a lot better if it stopped clickbaiting (which attracts the most feebleminded parts of the peanuts nogrammer gallery in the comments) and labelled -> aggregated its benchmarks according to SIMD support/enablement, threading and type (CPU, GPGPU, 3D, etc...). And investigated strange issues in results instead of drowning readers in data. Basically, we need something in-between Phoronix and ChipsAndCheese for benchmarks. Also reading Igor's Lab and GamerNexus when I want some data about hardware, but it's Windows focused, sadly.

phoronixrly 2y ago
At this point I suspect if Phoronix suddenly takes a turn and stops being clickbait blogspam, it would be alienating its core audience... People that love to read ragebait and argue aimlessly in the comments.
Sesse__ 2y ago
> And investigated strange issues in results instead of drowning readers in data. The basic problem of Phoronix is that it doesn't have the capacity nor competence to do this. Journalism is expensive and takes time, and Phoronix is a single person. If they were to actually go in and investigate every strange issue they had in their benchmarks (assuming they even notice them!), or add reasonable commentary beyond the seemingly autogenerated “in benchmark X, device Y seems go be ahead”, they would have to cut the number of articles and benchmarks drastically. Kind of like Anandtech, really; one of my main gripes with it is that there just wasn't _enough_ of it per unit of time.
pas 2y ago
Diversity as a topic and problem space has became undeniably important though. Of course it's not an easy topic, does not really lend itself to the usual reporting methodology of LWN. I wholeheartedly agree that many times it is completely counterproductive to post/host content that tries and fails to engage with diversity, because - as you pointed out - even the mention of it gives that ugly sour taste when browsing a site. Yet the topic won't really lose its salience as long as the problems themselves are either "solved" or something crowds them out. I trust that the LWN editors are aware of this, and are not doing it for the clicks. So I think it's completely fair (more so necessary for progress) to critique bad takes on diversity, but I think it just leads to frustration to try to "wish it away".
- steve-rambo-fan 2y ago
  Diversity of opinion and experience is extremely important. Not diversity of your bedroom preferences or any other superficial characteristics that have no relation to technical qualities. Saying otherwise is racist and *ist by definition. Comments on those articles always go down the shitter. I petitioned the editors to disable commenting on them, and you can do the same -- politely and humbly, of course. The contact information is on the website, whoever wants to, will find it easily.
  - Nullabillity 2y ago
    If a place somehow ends up only employing people wearing brown shirts, isn't that a bit odd?
tredre3 2y ago
> Phoronix could get a lot better if it stopped clickbaiting I've been reading Phoronix for years and I don't recall seeing clickbait. Most of the time the titles are just quotes from the sourced article he links to. Even skimming https://www.phoronix.com/news https://www.phoronix.com/news I see no clickbait? Was it something they did in the past? Or is the clickbait specific to benchmarks, which I have no ability to interpret?
- BoingBoomTschak 2y ago
  https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linus-Torvalds-Bcachefs-Regrets https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linus-Torvalds-Bcachefs-Regret... clearly fabricating a juicy title by intentionally misinterpreting one of Linus' sentences. Just for the aforementioned peanut gallery watching two egos colliding like they would watch WWE. https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-Split-X.Org-Session https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-Split-X.Org-Session reporting about a pretty pointless change just to get that sweet Wayland/X11 drama driven flaming. Clickbaiting may have been the wrong word, there's not much of that, more "feeding drama to an audience he knows well" than anything. The comment section is almost Wccftech tier, these days.

spinningslate 2y ago

From TFA: > If anything, the need has increased as social media and changing advertising landscapes have made shallow, sensationalistic reporting all the more lucrative. And your comment: > There were people among us who would gladly pay for this kind of coverage It's Friday so I'm going to be optimistic. I'd like to think (maybe fantasise) that we've passed the low point of ad-fuelled, sensational, information-light, polarised, vacuous content. There are some promising shoots, from paid newsletters (e.g. stratechery plus [0]) to search (e.g. Kagi [1]). There are early signs that Browsers are coming back as a topic with Chrome's inexorable slide into increasingly obfuscated ways to slurp data [2] and the (very) early promise of e.g. ladybird [3] as the first genuinely new, ground-up browser for years. It's never going to be mainstream. As someone once wrote here, the economy is a machine that incessantly drives cost down. Orthodoxy says you can't get cheaper than free - but that presumes measuring cost solely in monetary terms. Widen the definition of "cost" though and what we have now is definitely not free: we pay with loss of privacy, social disfunction and mental health degradation among others. Challenging the commercial behemoths who benefit from the "free internet" myth is a massive task. Perhaps unassailable. If there's an upside, it's that the long tail - where quality, paid for content and services might thrive - is simultaneously meaningful enough to support a small but thriving industry, and small enough to be uninteresting to the 1000lb gorillas. That may be fantasy per above. But I'd rather cling to something hopeful. [0] https://stratechery.com/stratechery-plus/ https://stratechery.com/stratechery-plus/ [1] https://kagi.com/ https://kagi.com/ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41391412 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41391412 [3] https://ladybird.org/ https://ladybird.org/ -- EDIT: fixed grammar.

wickedsight 2y ago
> we've passed the low point of ad-fuelled, sensational, information-light, polarised, vacuous content I'm a bit more pessimistic I guess. Netflix at one point felt like the end of piracy, because it was becoming the portal to all great video content. Then everyone wanted a slice of the pie and started their own platform. Now, Netflix is starting to fill up with 'sensational, information-light, polarised, vacuous content' and they really seem to want to become ad-fuelled. I also dislike that I have to choose between giving up all my privacy to a ton of ad providers or needing 100 different subscriptions to get some good content. I kinda hope that Mozilla (or someone else) finds a way to become the Spotify/Netflix of the web. A place where I can pay a single fee that then gets distributed between the platforms and sites I visit. But I kinda know that that will never happen, since it gives too much power to that one platform. For a while I thought that blockchain/crypto might be a good way to fix this. But nobody seems to be building blockchain stuff to do the right thing, they only do it to rip people off.

Workaccount2 2y ago

>There were people among us who would gladly pay for this kind of coverage While strictly true, it almost certainly would only be a tiny fraction. Probably not far off from the small fraction that would visit their site without ad-blocking. I know people don't like hearing it, but the "I never want to see an advertisement again...and I don't have to" mentality that exists, especially within anandtechs tech minded demographic, does have material downsides. I'm not saying you shouldn't block ads, but I know 99% of you reading this have never whitelisted a single domain. Now crucify me for pulling a skeleton out of the closet.

asaddhamani 2y ago
If a site offers a reasonable priced alternative to ads I'll opt for that. I've donated at other times when that option is available. Otherwise I don't want to be tracked profusely. Ethics is sorely missing in online advertising.
- zooq_ai 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - fmos 2y ago
    Ha, you're assuming GP visits Youtube. (I don't, rather in this camp: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41400286 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41400286 )
- Workaccount2 2y ago
  This comment (not from you personally, Asad, but the idea of it) is the very core of the reason why I have such an axe to grind on this topic. One brings this ugly topic up, that ads keep sites running, and are showered by comments of people saying exactly what you said. Those comments get praise and lots of upvotes. Everyone pats themselves on the back. But when you are on the other side of the equation, the one dependent on ad views and/or subscriptions, the numbers unequivocally show that people are totally full of shit. That they are just virtue signalling to receive praise and to push the skeleton back in the closet. Again, not calling you out personally, I believe you do support creators. But I have done this song and dance many many times, and it always goes the same way.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

kzz102 2y ago

I kept thinking that Anandtech could have survived if they had not been part of a corporate ownership. Because they were owned by a media conglomerate, the pressure is on to behave more like other media business under the same ownership. They could have diversified in terms of revenue if they were independent.

awill 2y ago

but how do you explain AnandTech lasting so so long if the business model didn't work? I remember reading AnandTech >20 years ago. I think it failed now because they slowed down on releasing content. Over the last 2 years they've hardly published anything. They didn't even cover the latest iPhones (and when they did, it was months after release when no one cared anymore).

ksec 2y ago

I blame this on Future PLC. Not only their Ad model is worst of all the tech site, the tech layout and software for the site and posting articles were bad and I remember Ian complained about it multiple times. They could have at least focus on their core competency which is in-depth articles and explanations. Instead we now live in the world of rumours site like WCCftech, and Apple dominance in Tech circle since the iPhone means a lot of new ( relatively speaking ) tech readers are reading Macrumors and 9to5Mac as their tech new sources. Reporting things that those reporter dont understand and keep making fake rumours that makes absolutely no sense.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

mulderc 2y ago

I feel like something is very wrong when a publication the quality of AnandTech can't figure out a viable business model.

j45 2y ago

Very true. As much as we try to hope organizations might reinvent themselves or disrupt themselves for the future before something else does, they just provide a good service. I can't wonder if AnandTech had a substack angle it might have provided an option? Good, useful writing that teaches you how to look at, understand, use, or do something is invaluable. Creating beginners is everything in this world so they can progress.

hajile 2y ago

Chips and Cheese is Anandtech's spiritual successor and I think its patron model is probably better overall. https://chipsandcheese.com/ https://chipsandcheese.com/ David Kanter doesn't write articles very much these days, but Real World Tech has always had top-shelf stuff and it's one of the few places where all the comments are worth reading too. https://www.realworldtech.com/ https://www.realworldtech.com/

RickHull 2y ago

They should start a Substack