5 ms·

RIP magazines. Sad to think that they will be replaced with half-assed Wikihow articles or one-size-fits-all OpenAI-hallucinated slop.

• yazzku 2y ago
  Time to put glue on that pizza, folks.
• lobsterthief 2y ago
  Too bad we could never figure out monetization and attention economy competition for publishing
  • wombatpm 2y ago
    They gave it all up. Major publishers had teams of sales people with deep relationships with all of the ad spenders. They gave that up to doubleclick so they could sell eyeballs to purveyors of penis enhancement drugs for $0.25 per eyeball. Then per 1000 eyeballs, then per 1000 clicks. Then they let Google scrape everything for SEO. They never should have followed online content, they should have led.
  • 1oooqooq 2y ago
    I think Wikipedia filled that niche pretty well. if we didn't have the rat race everyone could just contribute the best knowledge and content and free software to the world. but instead of fixing the rat race we focus on literally everything else to conform to it.
• kev009 2y ago
  I'm still sad whenever I think about ACM Queue halting print, it was a window into such a different way of thinking to teenage self taught PHP idiot me and the print format helped me slow down and think since I already had plenty to do and read online.
• SideQuark 2y ago
  Not everything on the internet is "half-assed Wikihow articles or one-size-fits-all OpenAI-hallucinated slop." If that's your view of all internet content I recommend learning to find good information, which is more accessible and prevalent than anytime in history. That is why magazines are dying - the interent provides anything a magazine does, but with more depth, more solid authors, and more accessible. If a magazine article is too shallow, or above your head, or below your level, then you're stuck. But with the internet and basic searching skills, you can find any level of content, in writing, in video, with projects and how-to's, detailed explanations, teardowns, DIYs stuf, fundamental technical specs and protocols, and on and on.
  • dartos 2y ago
    Not everything, but at this point it’s the vast majority of content and most certainly the most common content the major search engines serve up.
    • SideQuark 2y ago
      Vast majority? That needs some proof. I routinely find the stuff I want on the first page of search, solid, deep content. Do people simply not know how to search? Most any topic has a wikipedia article on page 1, which is always a good gateway to learn an intro to something, and usually has links to much deeper content. Some tests: "chess" returns all pretty good content. "electronic music" - all good stuff, from wikipedia, to subreddits on EDM and related, to encyc britannica, and one news story. "how to cook salmon" - again all really good stuff: first few are simple and correct recipes, then a few videos, some reddit topics. Not a single crappy link. "who is quincy jones" - wikipedia hit top, news that he died today (quite a good set of links, no crackpot sites), his website, his instagram, National Endowment of the Arts link, encyclopedia britannica link. "does quantum entanglement violate local realism?" All good. Even pop stuff like "does taylor swift or the beatles have more grammys" has all good, solid hits: wikipedia, grammy.com, reddit post, quora, forbes, NYT,BBC, popvortex with a list of all grammys. Every link answered the question, is not wikihow, and is not AI generated. Yep, as I expected. My guess is you didn't actually try and just made a claim without evidence. Give me some topics for which the "the vast majority of content and most certainly the most common content the major search engines serve up" is "half-assed Wikihow articles or one-size-fits-all OpenAI-hallucinated slop." I found zero out of dozens of links on some widespread topic checks. Good luck.