9 ms·
I have very strong, probably controversial, feeling on arstechnica, but I believe the acquisition from Condé Nast has been a tragedy. Ars writers used to be ac
by anthonj 8mo ago
I have very strong, probably controversial, feeling on arstechnica, but I believe the acquisition from Condé Nast has been a tragedy.
Ars writers used to be actual experts, sometimes even phd level, on technical fields. And they used to write fantastical and very informative articles.
Who is left now?
There are still a couple of good writers from the old guard and the occasional good new one, but the website is flooded with "tech journalist", claiming to be "android or Apple product experts" or stuff like that, publishing articles that are 90% press material from some company and most of the times seems to have very little technical knowledge.
They also started writing product reviews that I would not be surprised to find out being sponsored, given their content.
Also what's the business with those weirdly formatted articles from wired?
Still a very good website but the quality is diving.
- idiotsecant 8mo ago[flagged]
- anthonj 8mo agoWell I am calling out an entire class of journalist. Every time I've made a similar statement I got some angry answer (or got my post hidden or removed).
- episode404 8mo ago> they used to write fantastical and very informative articles > Still a very good website These are indeed quite controversial opinions on ars.
- ReptileMan 8mo ago[flagged]
- embedding-shape 8mo ago> Ars writers used to be actual experts, sometimes even phd level, on technical fields. And they used to write fantastical and very informative articles. Who is left now? What places on the internet remains where articles are written by actual experts? I know only of a few, and they get fewer every year.
- lapcat 8mo ago> What places on the internet remains where articles are written by actual experts? The personal blogs of experts.
- embedding-shape 8mo agoExamples? :)
- alright2565 8mo agoFirst one that comes to mind is https://morethanmoore.substack.com/ https://morethanmoore.substack.com/
- embedding-shape 8mo agoRun by a Dr. Ian Cutress. Never heard about before, seems to describe themselves like this: > Industry Analyst, More Than Moore. Youtube Influencer and Educator. Seems they're one example of the sad trend of people going from being experts and instead diving into "influencing" instead, which comes with a massive list of drawbacks.
- weiliddat 8mo agoIan wrote a lot of in-depth technical reviews and articles at Anandtech. He’s not a nobody. https://archive.is/2022.02.18-161603/https://www.anandtech.com/show/17270/going-from-there-to-here-and-beyond https://archive.is/2022.02.18-161603/https://www.anandtech.c...
- amarant 8mo agoDamn, for someone asking specifically for experts with blogs, you sure have harsh opinion of experts with blogs!
- bloggie 8mo agotechbriefs, photonics spectra, photonics focus, EAA Sport Aviation? I don't think it's going to be anything super popular, to become popular you have to appeal to a broad audience. But in niches there is certainly very high quality material. It also won't be (completely) funded by advertising.
- tapoxi 8mo ago> I have very strong, probably controversial, feeling on arstechnica, but I believe the acquisition from Condé Nast has been a tragedy. For the curious, this acquisition was 18 years ago.
- airstrike 8mo agoGod, I didn't need to know that
- 01100011 8mo agoHow do I report online harassment? There's probably a button but I can't find it because I misplaced my reading glasses.
- ordersofmag 8mo agoIsn't arstechnica that new site that replaced slashdot?
- caminante 8mo agoI checked and was also expecting something different based on parent's comment. Happened 18 years ago. This is a hot take that has become room temp.
- foobarbecue 8mo agoI presume you meant "fantastic," not "fantastical"?
- Insanity 8mo agoWanted to comment the same. Parent poster might not be aware that “fantastical” means “fantasy”. But I think we do get his point regardless :)
- jmbwell 8mo agoI think fantastical isn’t totally inaccurate, and I’m not being snarky (for once). The personal observations and sometimes colorful language has been something I like about Ars. Benj in particular, with his warm tributes to BBSes. Or Jim Salter’s very human networking articles. The best stuff on Ars is both technically sound and rich with human experience. “Fantastical” taken to mean something like, capturing the thrills and aspirations that emerge from our contact with technology, seems fair I think. I’ll be interested in finding out more about just what the hell happened here. I hardly think of Benj or Kyle as AI cowboy hacks, something doesn’t add up
- eduction 8mo ago“Fantastical” means based on fantasy: not real. A fantastical journalism source is one filled with lies. You seem to think it means “extra fantastic.” Not correct.
- strken 8mo agoIt has a second definition which means something like "unbelievable in its strangeness/perfection", which can be used to imply that a real thing feels made up. I agree that it's not a good word choice when describing a thing that could actually be fake, but you could describe a view from a mountain as fantastical even though it was 100% real.
- dnisbet 8mo agoBenj Edwards posted about it on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/benjedwards.com/post/3mewgow6ch22p https://bsky.app/profile/benjedwards.com/post/3mewgow6ch22p
- mbreese 8mo agoI think the fact that they one of the last places surviving from that generation of the Internet says a lot. The Condé Nast acquisition may have been a tragedy, but they managed to survive for this long. They’ve been continuously publishing online for about 30 years. It’s honestly amazing that they’ve managed to last this long. Yes, it’s very different than it was back in the day. You don’t see 20+ page reviews of operating systems anymore, but I still think it’s a worthwhile place to visit. Trying to survive in this online media market has definitely taken a toll. This current mistake makes me sad.
- krull10 8mo agoTheir review of MacOS 26 is 79 pages when downloaded as a pdf, so they still sometimes have in depth articles. But I agree that that level of detail isn’t as common as in the past.
- Barbing 8mo agoIt’s good, too. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/09/macos-26-tahoe-the-ars-technica-review https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/09/macos-26-tahoe-the-a...
- x0x0 8mo agoEveryone's dancing around the problem. People refuse to pay the cost of producing high quality news. Advertising doesn't come close to cutting it. You can see a new generation of media that charge subscribers enough to make a modest profit, and it's things like Talking Points Memo ($70 base cost per year), Defector ($70 or $80 I think), The Information ($500), 404 ($100), etc.
- mbreese 8mo agoArsTechnica has had subscriber tiers for quite a while. I am one. I’m not sure how many people subscribe or what their numbers look like, but I’d hope that Ars will be able to still be able to keep going in whatever the new media market looks like. Josh at TPM has actually been quite open/vocal about how to run a successful (mildly profitable) media site in the current market. I think we are seeing transitions towards more subscriber based sites (more like the magazine model, now that I think about it). See The Verge as a more recent example.
- phyzome 8mo agoIt gets pretty bad at times. Here's one of the most mindlessly uncritical pieces I've seen, which seems to be a press release from Volkswagen: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2017/03/volkswagen-unveils-sedric-its-first-fully-autonomous-vehicle/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2017/03/volkswagen-unveils-sedr... Look at the image captions gushing about the "roomy interior" of a vehicle that doesn't even exist! I actually wrote in to say how disappointed I was in this ad/press release material, and the response was "That was not a VW ad and we were not paid by VW for that or any other story". I find it interesting that they only denied the ad part, not the press release part... As I mention in another comment, https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/01/exclusive-volvo-tells-us-why-having-gemini-in-your-next-car-is-a-good-thing/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/01/exclusive-volvo-tells-u... is in a similar vein.
- ktm5j 8mo agoThat car looks so unhappy :|
- lokar 8mo agoI'm willing to believe it was not an ad. They are just lazy / understaffed. It's hard to make $ in journalism. A longstanding and popular way to cut corners is to let the industry you cover do most of the work for you. You just re-package press releases. You have plausible content for a fraction of the effort / cost.
- dylan604 8mo agoUnfortunately, government is like that were most bills are written by lobbyists and barely if at all modified by the actual congress critter sponsoring it.
- lokar 8mo agoI think that's much more common in state government (in the US). Most bill in the US Congress are not actually meant to pass, they are just (often poorly written) PR stunts.
- 8mo ago
- airstrike 8mo agoI got banned for calling out the shilling back right after the acquisition. Apparently that was a personal attack on the quality of the author. It's gone downhill from there. I used to visit it every day, now I mostly forget it exists
- elgertam 8mo agoI used to read it daily. Even continued for a few years after the acquisition. But at this point, I haven't looked at it in years. Even tend to skip the articles that make it to the first page of HN. Of course, most of the original writers I still follow on social media, and some have started their own Substack publications.
- GeekyBear 8mo ago> publishing articles that are 90% press material from some company and most of the times seems to have very little technical knowledge. Unfortunately, this is my impression as well. I really miss Anandtech's reporting, especially their deep dives and performance testing for new core designs.
- zdw 8mo agoThe main problem with technology coverage is you have one of 3 types of writers in the space: 1. Prosumer/enthusiasts who are somewhat technical, but mostly excitement 2. People who have professional level skills and also enjoy writing about it 3. Companies who write things because they sell things A lot of sites are in category 1 - mostly excitement/enthusiasm, and feels. Anandtech, TechReport, and to some extent Arstechnica (specially John Siracusa's OS X reviews) are the rare category 2. Category 3 are things like the Puget Systems blog where they benchmark hardware, but also sell it, and it functions more as a buyer information. The problem is that category 2 is that they can fairly easily get jobs in industry that pay way more than writing for a website. I'd imagine that when Anand joined Apple, this was likely the case, and if so that makes total sense.
- GeekyBear 8mo agoWhen Andrei Frumusanu left Anandtech for Qualcomm, I'm sure he was paid much more for engineering chips than he was for writing about them, but his insight into the various core designs released for desktops and mobile was head and shoulders above anything I've seen since. It's a shame that I can't even find a publication that runs and publishes the SPEC benchmarks on new core designs now that he is gone, despite SPEC having been the gold standard of performance comparison between dissimilar cores for decades.
- zdw 8mo agoThere are still places that benchmark, but mostly for commercial apps like Puget Systems in the earlier post. Phoronix can also be useful as well for benching open source stuff. I wouldn't put much trust in well-known benchmark suites as in many cases proprietary compilers, a huge amount of effort was put into Goodhart's law optimizing to the exact needs of the benchmark.
- somenameforme 8mo agoThey are basically the embodiment of the fact that sites and organizations don't matter, but individuals do. I think the overwhelming majority of everything on Ars is garbage. But on the other hand they also run Eric Berger's space column [1] which is certainly one of the best ones out there. So don't ignore those names on tops of articles. If you find something informative, well sourced, and so on - there's a good chance most their other writing is of a similar standard. [1] - https://arstechnica.com/author/ericberger/ https://arstechnica.com/author/ericberger/
- miltonlost 8mo agoAh, and here my problem with Eric is he basically never criticizes Elon and only calls him "controversial". He's just a Musk mouthpiece at this point.
- mistercheph 8mo agoWhat would you do if you loved space as much as he does? There are no other heroes to cheer for
- mbreese 8mo agoOr many other sources. If you’re writing about Space, you kinda need to cover SpaceX. If you’re opening critical of everything the owner says, pretty soon you won’t have any sources at SpaceX to give you the insights you need to do your job. I get the impression that the space field is pretty small, so you might not want to burn too many bridges. Also, mission lengths can cover decades. In this case, it might be best to have a short memory when the story has a long time horizon.
- somenameforme 8mo agoThis is even more true when politics has a rather short time horizon. Musk decided to jump into public politics at a time when the nation is substantially more divided and radicalized than it's been in living memory for most of us, to say nothing of being fueled by a media that's descended into nothing but endless hyper partisan yellow journalism. It's not really a surprise that things didn't work out great. But as the 'affected' move on to new people and new controversies, perspectives will moderate and normalize over time. And, with any luck, Elon can get back to what he does well and we can get men back on the Moon and then on Mars in the not so distant future.
- BruceEel 8mo agoA tragedy, yes. I can't be the only old fart around here with fond memories of John Siracusa's macOS ("OS X") reviews & Jon "Hannibal" Stokes' deep dives in CPU microarchitectures...
- calmbonsai 8mo agoJohn Siracusa's macOS reviews were so in-depth people even published reviews of his reviews.
- herodoturtle 8mo agoCertainly not the only old fart ‘round these parts. Your comment reminded me of Dr Dobbs Journal for some reason.
- kbutler 8mo agoI finally subscribed to Dr. Dobbs for the Michael Abrash graphics articles, about a month before he ended them.
- guiambros 8mo agoDr Dobbs was pretty good until almost the end, no? If memory serves me well, I recall the magazine got thinner and more sparse towards the end, but still high signal-to-noise ratio. Quite the opposite of Ars T. Huge debt of gratitude to DDJ. I remember taking the bus to the capital every month just to buy the magazine on the newsstand.
- trollbridge 8mo agoI would go to the library on my bicycle to scour for a new copy of DDJ as a 10 year old. I had dreams of someday meeting “Dr. Dobbs.” Of course, that was back in the day when Microsoft mailed me a free Windows SDK with printed manuals when I sent them a letter asking them how to write Windows programs, complete with a note from somebody important (maybe Ballmer) wishing me luck programming for Windows. Wish I’d kept it.
- 8mo ago
- bootlooped 8mo agoI got very tired of seeing the same video thumbnails over and over. It seemed like at some point they were pushing into video, of which there were some good ones they put out, but then they stopped. They kept the video links in the articles but since there are only a handful you'll just see the same ones over and over. I've probably seen the first 3 or 4 seconds of the one with the Dead Space guy about a hundred times now.
- zahlman 8mo ago> the acquisition from Condé Nast By Condé Nast? Or did they get acquired again?
- jasonwatkinspdx 8mo agoYeah, I was very active on the ars forums back in the day, and after the buyout things initially were ok, but started go do down hill pretty clearly once the old guard of authors started leaving. It's a shame because the old ars had a surprisingly good signal to noise ratio vs other big sites of that era.
- kevin_thibedeau 8mo ago> what's the business with those weirdly formatted articles from wired? You must have missed the 90's Wired magazine era with magenta text on a striped background and other goofiness. Weird formatting is their thing.
- tyjen 8mo agoIt's worse than that, Condé Nast is owned by Advance Publications. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Advance_subsidiaries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Advance_subsidiaries They own a depressing number of "local" newspapers to project excessive influence.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- DANmode 8mo ago> probably controversial, feeling on arstechnica, but I believe the acquisition from Condé Nast has been a tragedy. Controversial how? They took a lot of value away from the communities at Reddit.com, too. Lots of us remember both.
- xnx 8mo agoArs is disproportionately popular here for a site that just copies from other news sources. Do they add any value beyond serving as a link list for a certain type of content?
- pseudohadamard 8mo agoArse Technica have always been pretty bad at following up with people they publish stories on. Years ago they ran a hit piece on a friend of mine for which they never bothered contacting him for his side of the story despite his home page with full contact info being literally the first Google result on a search for his name. Their tech stories are usually superficial but adequate, but don't assume you're getting any kind of valid reporting on controversies.
- physicsguy 8mo agoThey had some great video series too which seem to have stopped. Their War Stories gaming interviews were brilliant.
- Cluelessidoit 8mo agoAMEN