7 ms·

Anandtech.com now redirects to its forums

262 points by kmfrk 1y ago

giantfrog 1y ago
Big loss for the web.
kmfrk 1y ago
anandtech.com now redirects to the forums instead its front page of articles. Here is what the website previously tweeted about its future a year ago after winding down operations.[1] Originally heard this via https://x.com/System360Cheese/status/1951501044875477254 https://x.com/System360Cheese/status/1951501044875477254. The latest indexed frontpage in the Internet Archive is from July 28: https://web.archive.org/web/20250728143805/https://www.anandtech.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20250728143805/https://www.anand.... The original farewell article, which is now only readable through the IA: https://web.archive.org/web/20250726035557/https://www.anandtech.com/show/21542/end-of-the-road-an-anandtech-farewell https://web.archive.org/web/20250726035557/https://www.anand.... One paragraph reads: "And while the AnandTech staff is riding off into the sunset, I am happy to report that the site itself won’t be going anywhere for a while. Our publisher, Future PLC, will be keeping the AnandTech website and its many articles live indefinitely. So that all of the content we’ve created over the years remains accessible and citable. Even without new articles to add to the collection, I expect that many of the things we’ve written over the past couple of decades will remain relevant for years to come – and remain accessible just as long." [1]: https://x.com/anandtech/status/1829489697384706555 https://x.com/anandtech/status/1829489697384706555 > AnandTech will stay online so readers can continue to access articles from our archive, and the forums will remain active to serve our community. Our sister site Tom's Hardware, will also continue to publish all the latest news, reviews and more from the PC world. Thank you all
- layer8 1y ago
  So “indefinitely” turned out to be only 11 months.
  - musicale 1y ago
    "years to come"
  - gblargg 1y ago
    Just like lifetime subscriptions and warranties.
- musicale 1y ago
  Future PLC seems to be gradually shutting down all of its activities, one publication or site at a time. It's a shame because many of them had been publishing for decades. Were they really completely unsustainable? The ads in magazines like Computer Music and Future Music were actually interesting and relevant, unlike typical garbage web ads.
  - fredoralive 1y ago
    I think it's more they've shifted away from their original focus as a specialist computer publisher into a more general publisher. I realised a couple of months ago they publish the TV Times nowadays, and also stuff like Country Life and Home and Gardens. Tech stuff is just another line on the balance sheet now. I doubt if magazines (and websites etc.) in general are doing great, but for obvious reasons the more techy stuff is probably going to be a bit more vulnerable, particularly in print.
    - TheOtherHobbes 1y ago
      The fact that Future Publishing - once the scrappy 90s flagship of new tech journalism - now owns Country Life is something I will always find hilarious.
- tiffanyh 1y ago
  > "the site itself won’t be going anywhere for a while" Seems people focused too much on the phrase "I am happy to report". When the actual key phrase people missed was "for a while". In hindsight, that implies knowledge it would be shutdown at some future date. And while many people understand "indefinitely" to mean "unlimited", it also has a secondary meaning of "unspecified period of time".
kcb 1y ago
This is not great. Decades of hardware reviews all the way back to the first GPUs becoming less accessible. Why would anyone consider taking it down when there was so much content that could be hosted with little effort while still making some ad revenue? Anandtech articles were still at the top of many Google searches.
- halJordan 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - kcb 1y ago
    Ok?
- nerdsniper 1y ago
  Being near the top of Google means you get an incredible amount of bot and AI traffic which costs a surprisingly large amount of money.
  - dangus 1y ago
    Simultaneously, the fact that anyone with any supposed business experience gifted that priceless level of ranking would decide to shut down the business is insane. Like, the fact that someone is making money off of MySpace.com right now and Anandtech couldn’t swing it makes zero logical sense. To me it feels like they tried nothing and were all out of ideas. But that’s private equity for you.
    - Scoundreller 1y ago
      I’m still upset Rakuten shutdown fatwallet. Those forums were the best. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FatWallet https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FatWallet
    - kmeisthax 1y ago
      Any time private equity does something stupid or short-sighted, remember this: Private equity firms - or, at least, the ones that people complain about - don't own their own capital. They have to rent it from somewhere else, and those people get paid first. The PE firm only really gets paid for their expertise when they make their hurdle. Ergo, PE is incentivized to make terribly short-sighted business decisions, because those are the ones that will bring in the money to make their hurdle. They get caught in a loop of buying and gutting otherwise productive businesses. This capital structure made sense back when PE was a tiny part of the economy that bought and modernized small businesses, but now PE is more akin to a failing empire; with an entitled aristocratic class that will shiv any leader that tries to change the structure to be more sustainable. They are spending $2000 on candles and the candles have knives.
bwb 1y ago
God this is sad :(
dangle1 1y ago
A forum member says that an archive exists: https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/anandtech-editorial-announcement.2621717/post-41486103 https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/anandtech-editorial-ann...
5pl1n73r 1y ago
Just learned they've stopped publishing. Sad! The old web is really dying. Seems like a bug though? They said they'll keep the site up "indefinitely".
- bee_rider 1y ago
  Chips and Cheese seems like a basically fine replacement for Anandtech. Things change, and the internet has gotten worse since then, but specifically chip benchmarking doesn’t seem too bad.
  - smueller1234 1y ago
    I think Chips and Cheese is more like a fine replacement for realworldtech.com sans the toxic and highly educational and entertaining forums. Anandtech was much more accessible to the general tech public, but also more commercial and thus hit and miss on the content (no judgement intended, gotta eat).
- icepush 1y ago
  Indefinitely in the sense of an unknown amount of time (Not infinitely)
  - debugnik 1y ago
    From another comment here, they did say: > I expect that many of the things we’ve written over the past couple of decades will remain relevant for years to come – and remain accessible just as long.
- eddiewithzato 1y ago
  Old web died when youtube reviews became more profitable. It’s sad because I miss printed content like tech magazines.
  - vachina 1y ago
    We’ve gone full circle now with video summarizers turning videos back into text.
dang 1y ago
Related, I guess: AnandTech Farewell - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41399872 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41399872 - Aug 2024 (598 comments)
- lgats 1y ago
  https://web.archive.org/web/20250726001915/https://www.anandtech.com/show/21542/end-of-the-road-an-anandtech-farewell https://web.archive.org/web/20250726001915/https://www.anand...
- joecool1029 1y ago
  https://archive.ph/bewtN https://archive.ph/bewtN
bananapub 1y ago
did they not provide a copy of the CMS to the Internet Archive??!
- neuroelectron 1y ago
  People probably already archived it on there themselves.
Aardwolf 1y ago
Interesting, usually it's the forums of websites that die first, instead of the static content, due to requiring active maintenance and moderation...
Numerlor 1y ago
Already got bit by this, remembered an external SSD I opened had a review there and wanted to compare hardware, and wasn't able to get to the review
stuffoverflow 1y ago
Archiveteam did a full site crawl[1] when Anandtech announced they were stopping. You can browse the warc.gz files like a regular web page using https://replayweb.page https://replayweb.page Alternatively you could use solrwayback[2] to index and browse the warc files. 1: https://archive.fart.website/archivebot/viewer/job/20240901213047bvqa8 https://archive.fart.website/archivebot/viewer/job/202409012... 2: https://github.com/netarchivesuite/solrwayback https://github.com/netarchivesuite/solrwayback
- seabass-labrax 1y ago
  Also Kiwix[1] is an excellent app for browsing websites offline. You can use warc2zim[2] to convert the WARC files to ZIM files for use with Kiwix. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the DWDS (digital dictionary of the German language) app is actually Kiwix! [1]: https://www.kiwix.org/ https://www.kiwix.org/ [2]: https://github.com/openzim/warc2zim https://github.com/openzim/warc2zim
  - formerly_proven 1y ago
    > Kiwix ... I haven't heard this name in 15 years probably. Back then you could bring Wikipedia offline on a laptop, it was only around 20-25 GB.
    - badsectoracula 1y ago
      You can still bring Wikipedia offline on a laptop (and mobile phone, for some of the larger ones), it is just that you'd need around 100GB instead. There is even a library[0] you can use to do your own wikipedia viewer. [0] https://github.com/openzim/libzim https://github.com/openzim/libzim
      - wkat4242 1y ago
        Yes and much less than 100 if you can do without images
    - joshvm 1y ago
creatonez 1y ago
Not even techy people can keep a list of simple URL redirects active?
- pimlottc 1y ago
  Pretty sure the techy people have left the building
cnst 1y ago
I honestly don't understand why companies do this. There's still SO MUCH traffic from Google for these things. I've routinely went to AnandTech EXCLUSIVELY from Google. This means that their "news" and new content is of little relevance to me, as it's usually something from a few years prior that I'm reading over there. Yet somehow, "have to publish every day"?! Part of me thinks that this is related to the inefficiencies of all these CMS, where it costs too much to run the site compared to the revenue from the ads. Or is there another reason? Frankly, as an nginx "practitioner", all of these sites could basically be cached and served from a single $50/mo server from Hetzner, Online or OVH. Aren't they're getting far more in ad revenue than that? How does it make any sense to close the shop when you've got such a treasure trove that you could continue milking easily for at least like half a decade?
- mpclark 1y ago
  Those who are currently publishing will tell you otherwise; traffic from Google has dropped off a cliff. There’s a little bit of long tail, but nothing like the volumes the tech media built its businesses around.
  - jonatron 1y ago
    If I look at another tech site that stopped publishing, but where the content going back to year 2000 is still online [1], there's very little human traffic, vast majority is bot traffic. [1] https://hexus.net/tech/reviews/cpu/132-amd-duron-850/ https://hexus.net/tech/reviews/cpu/132-amd-duron-850/
idonotknowwhy 1y ago
This sucks. Same with cnet, so many spec sheets for old crt monitors gone
wkat4242 1y ago
It was already over when its namesake left for Apple really.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

262 points by kmfrk 1y ago

Big loss for the web.

anandtech.com now redirects to the forums instead its front page of articles. Here is what the website previously tweeted about its future a year ago after winding down operations.[1] Originally heard this via https://x.com/System360Cheese/status/1951501044875477254 https://x.com/System360Cheese/status/1951501044875477254. The latest indexed frontpage in the Internet Archive is from July 28: https://web.archive.org/web/20250728143805/https://www.anandtech.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20250728143805/https://www.anand.... The original farewell article, which is now only readable through the IA: https://web.archive.org/web/20250726035557/https://www.anandtech.com/show/21542/end-of-the-road-an-anandtech-farewell https://web.archive.org/web/20250726035557/https://www.anand.... One paragraph reads: "And while the AnandTech staff is riding off into the sunset, I am happy to report that the site itself won’t be going anywhere for a while. Our publisher, Future PLC, will be keeping the AnandTech website and its many articles live indefinitely. So that all of the content we’ve created over the years remains accessible and citable. Even without new articles to add to the collection, I expect that many of the things we’ve written over the past couple of decades will remain relevant for years to come – and remain accessible just as long." [1]: https://x.com/anandtech/status/1829489697384706555 https://x.com/anandtech/status/1829489697384706555 > AnandTech will stay online so readers can continue to access articles from our archive, and the forums will remain active to serve our community. Our sister site Tom's Hardware, will also continue to publish all the latest news, reviews and more from the PC world. Thank you all

layer8 1y ago
So “indefinitely” turned out to be only 11 months.
- musicale 1y ago
  "years to come"
- gblargg 1y ago
  Just like lifetime subscriptions and warranties.
musicale 1y ago
Future PLC seems to be gradually shutting down all of its activities, one publication or site at a time. It's a shame because many of them had been publishing for decades. Were they really completely unsustainable? The ads in magazines like Computer Music and Future Music were actually interesting and relevant, unlike typical garbage web ads.
- fredoralive 1y ago
  I think it's more they've shifted away from their original focus as a specialist computer publisher into a more general publisher. I realised a couple of months ago they publish the TV Times nowadays, and also stuff like Country Life and Home and Gardens. Tech stuff is just another line on the balance sheet now. I doubt if magazines (and websites etc.) in general are doing great, but for obvious reasons the more techy stuff is probably going to be a bit more vulnerable, particularly in print.
  - TheOtherHobbes 1y ago
    The fact that Future Publishing - once the scrappy 90s flagship of new tech journalism - now owns Country Life is something I will always find hilarious.
tiffanyh 1y ago
> "the site itself won’t be going anywhere for a while" Seems people focused too much on the phrase "I am happy to report". When the actual key phrase people missed was "for a while". In hindsight, that implies knowledge it would be shutdown at some future date. And while many people understand "indefinitely" to mean "unlimited", it also has a secondary meaning of "unspecified period of time".

kcb 1y ago

This is not great. Decades of hardware reviews all the way back to the first GPUs becoming less accessible. Why would anyone consider taking it down when there was so much content that could be hosted with little effort while still making some ad revenue? Anandtech articles were still at the top of many Google searches.

halJordan 1y ago
[flagged]
- kcb 1y ago
  Ok?
nerdsniper 1y ago
Being near the top of Google means you get an incredible amount of bot and AI traffic which costs a surprisingly large amount of money.
- dangus 1y ago
  Simultaneously, the fact that anyone with any supposed business experience gifted that priceless level of ranking would decide to shut down the business is insane. Like, the fact that someone is making money off of MySpace.com right now and Anandtech couldn’t swing it makes zero logical sense. To me it feels like they tried nothing and were all out of ideas. But that’s private equity for you.
  - Scoundreller 1y ago
    I’m still upset Rakuten shutdown fatwallet. Those forums were the best. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FatWallet https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FatWallet
  - kmeisthax 1y ago
    Any time private equity does something stupid or short-sighted, remember this: Private equity firms - or, at least, the ones that people complain about - don't own their own capital. They have to rent it from somewhere else, and those people get paid first. The PE firm only really gets paid for their expertise when they make their hurdle. Ergo, PE is incentivized to make terribly short-sighted business decisions, because those are the ones that will bring in the money to make their hurdle. They get caught in a loop of buying and gutting otherwise productive businesses. This capital structure made sense back when PE was a tiny part of the economy that bought and modernized small businesses, but now PE is more akin to a failing empire; with an entitled aristocratic class that will shiv any leader that tries to change the structure to be more sustainable. They are spending $2000 on candles and the candles have knives.

bwb 1y ago

God this is sad :(

dangle1 1y ago

A forum member says that an archive exists: https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/anandtech-editorial-announcement.2621717/post-41486103 https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/anandtech-editorial-ann...

5pl1n73r 1y ago

Just learned they've stopped publishing. Sad! The old web is really dying. Seems like a bug though? They said they'll keep the site up "indefinitely".

bee_rider 1y ago
Chips and Cheese seems like a basically fine replacement for Anandtech. Things change, and the internet has gotten worse since then, but specifically chip benchmarking doesn’t seem too bad.
- smueller1234 1y ago
  I think Chips and Cheese is more like a fine replacement for realworldtech.com sans the toxic and highly educational and entertaining forums. Anandtech was much more accessible to the general tech public, but also more commercial and thus hit and miss on the content (no judgement intended, gotta eat).
icepush 1y ago
Indefinitely in the sense of an unknown amount of time (Not infinitely)
- debugnik 1y ago
  From another comment here, they did say: > I expect that many of the things we’ve written over the past couple of decades will remain relevant for years to come – and remain accessible just as long.
eddiewithzato 1y ago
Old web died when youtube reviews became more profitable. It’s sad because I miss printed content like tech magazines.
- vachina 1y ago
  We’ve gone full circle now with video summarizers turning videos back into text.

dang 1y ago

Related, I guess: AnandTech Farewell - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41399872 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41399872 - Aug 2024 (598 comments)

lgats 1y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20250726001915/https://www.anandtech.com/show/21542/end-of-the-road-an-anandtech-farewell https://web.archive.org/web/20250726001915/https://www.anand...
joecool1029 1y ago
https://archive.ph/bewtN https://archive.ph/bewtN

bananapub 1y ago

did they not provide a copy of the CMS to the Internet Archive??!

neuroelectron 1y ago
People probably already archived it on there themselves.

Aardwolf 1y ago

Interesting, usually it's the forums of websites that die first, instead of the static content, due to requiring active maintenance and moderation...

Numerlor 1y ago

Already got bit by this, remembered an external SSD I opened had a review there and wanted to compare hardware, and wasn't able to get to the review

stuffoverflow 1y ago

Archiveteam did a full site crawl[1] when Anandtech announced they were stopping. You can browse the warc.gz files like a regular web page using https://replayweb.page https://replayweb.page Alternatively you could use solrwayback[2] to index and browse the warc files. 1: https://archive.fart.website/archivebot/viewer/job/20240901213047bvqa8 https://archive.fart.website/archivebot/viewer/job/202409012... 2: https://github.com/netarchivesuite/solrwayback https://github.com/netarchivesuite/solrwayback

seabass-labrax 1y ago
Also Kiwix[1] is an excellent app for browsing websites offline. You can use warc2zim[2] to convert the WARC files to ZIM files for use with Kiwix. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the DWDS (digital dictionary of the German language) app is actually Kiwix! [1]: https://www.kiwix.org/ https://www.kiwix.org/ [2]: https://github.com/openzim/warc2zim https://github.com/openzim/warc2zim
- formerly_proven 1y ago
  > Kiwix ... I haven't heard this name in 15 years probably. Back then you could bring Wikipedia offline on a laptop, it was only around 20-25 GB.
  - badsectoracula 1y ago
    You can still bring Wikipedia offline on a laptop (and mobile phone, for some of the larger ones), it is just that you'd need around 100GB instead. There is even a library[0] you can use to do your own wikipedia viewer. [0] https://github.com/openzim/libzim https://github.com/openzim/libzim
    - wkat4242 1y ago
      Yes and much less than 100 if you can do without images
  - joshvm 1y ago

creatonez 1y ago

Not even techy people can keep a list of simple URL redirects active?

pimlottc 1y ago
Pretty sure the techy people have left the building

cnst 1y ago

I honestly don't understand why companies do this. There's still SO MUCH traffic from Google for these things. I've routinely went to AnandTech EXCLUSIVELY from Google. This means that their "news" and new content is of little relevance to me, as it's usually something from a few years prior that I'm reading over there. Yet somehow, "have to publish every day"?! Part of me thinks that this is related to the inefficiencies of all these CMS, where it costs too much to run the site compared to the revenue from the ads. Or is there another reason? Frankly, as an nginx "practitioner", all of these sites could basically be cached and served from a single $50/mo server from Hetzner, Online or OVH. Aren't they're getting far more in ad revenue than that? How does it make any sense to close the shop when you've got such a treasure trove that you could continue milking easily for at least like half a decade?

mpclark 1y ago
Those who are currently publishing will tell you otherwise; traffic from Google has dropped off a cliff. There’s a little bit of long tail, but nothing like the volumes the tech media built its businesses around.
- jonatron 1y ago
  If I look at another tech site that stopped publishing, but where the content going back to year 2000 is still online [1], there's very little human traffic, vast majority is bot traffic. [1] https://hexus.net/tech/reviews/cpu/132-amd-duron-850/ https://hexus.net/tech/reviews/cpu/132-amd-duron-850/

idonotknowwhy 1y ago

This sucks. Same with cnet, so many spec sheets for old crt monitors gone

wkat4242 1y ago

It was already over when its namesake left for Apple really.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]