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The H is closing down
- raphinou 13y agoThat's a pitty. I went there daily because they had good quality coverage, sometimes of topics I didn't read anywhere else. You will be missed, The H....
- wyclif 13y agoSo after reading this, my only question is why they couldn't make it profitable.
- fuzzix 13y agoThey generally eschewed false-dichotomy driven, dramatic reporting with hyperbolic, click-hungry headlines.
- petercooper 13y agoAnd the Web is a horrible place to do that unless you work out how to get paying subscribers or sell your own products/services because regular ad rates are through the floor. Now on e-mail, a tablet app, etc.. it'd have added up.
- rachelp 13y agoThis is a loss, The H covered a lot of interesting material that other titles frankly just didn't understand!
- jakub_g 13y agoCan anyone point some sensible alternative? On a daily basis, I've been reading only The H and HN for many months.
- raphinou 13y agoI find arstechnica also brings quality articles
- sciurus 13y agoThey still have some good articles, but they have a lot more noise to filter through than they used to. Their coverage of linux and free software, something The H excelled at, is basically nonexistent.
- Spittie 13y agoFor Linux news, http://lwn.net/ http://lwn.net/ is great, specially if you get a paid subscription (or wait one week to read their featured articles), but their target is probably different.
- dredmorbius 13y agoI'll second LWN, and have been a subscriber for years.
- mariuz 13y agoalso http://linuxhomepage.com http://linuxhomepage.com
- jmomo 13y agohttp://www.phoronix.com http://www.phoronix.com
- LinaLauneBaer 13y agoThe H is/was the english speaking child of heise.de - the biggest German tech news website and a big publisher of tech magazines and books. They belong to Springer.
- lazyjones 13y agoheise.de belongs to the "Heise Medien Gruppe" and certainly not to Springer. Heise has a long history as an independent, privately owned publisher, it's still a family-run business: http://www.heise-medien.de/artikel/Geschichte-1357257.html http://www.heise-medien.de/artikel/Geschichte-1357257.html
- LinaLauneBaer 13y agoSorry. I remembered the facts incorrectly. I know that heise is working together (owning?) with another publisher (d.punkt) and they said about themselves that Springer is invested in them. So I got it mixed up in my brain. Sorry again...
- claudius 13y agoAnd then there’s Springer[0], one of the largest scientific publishers worldwide, and Springer[1], one of the largest tabloid owners worldwide. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Springer_Science%2BBusiness_Media https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Springer_Science%2BBusiness_Me... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axel_Springer_AG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axel_Springer_AG
- arnehormann 13y agoIf you loved The H (heise UK), try http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=de&sl=de&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.heise.de%2F http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=de&sl=de&tl=en&u=ht... (heise Germany). It's the same company, has same excellent quality, a vastly larger offering - but it's in German. They don't have the same monetization issues, though. Heise is a magazine publisher and printing house based in Hannover, Lower Saxony. I was really surprised and amused when I saw they also printed the phone book...
- Nux 13y agoOh, no! I love The H! :( It is THE one serious IT news web site, no bullshit or sensationalistic crap; well written articles by competent people. I'm so sorry it did not work out for them, both for them and for myself.
- sbarre 13y agoI just discovered it earlier this year, and I loved it as well! This makes me sad.. Although I'm glad HN is gathering up alternatives for OSS IT news
- Ecio78 13y agono bullshit or sensationalistic crap Unfortunately, and probably, this is the reason they didn't monetise it enough :/
- Yaa101 13y agoI can only agree with this, very sad...
- maaaats 13y agoIt's sad that a serious site like this gets shut down. I kinda see why online news papers often are shit; it's the only way to make money. Why don't we as users make sites like these able to monetize? In a weird way, most sites are the way we don't like them, because in some weird way that's what we "like" and that's what pays off.
- sbarre 13y agoI would suspect that the target demographic for sites like this is much more likely to be using ad blocking plugins, adding a further hurdle to monetization.
- bkor 13y agoI block ads, but I have a subscription on LWN. Probably would have done the same on h-online if their comment section would be a bit more integrated. I've been reading this site for various years, the reporting is pretty good.
- sbarre 13y agoI'm with you on that. I gladly subscribe to sites I enjoy, for exactly the same reason (Ars Technica, Giant Bomb, etc) I was pretty new to h-online, but I suspect it would have joined the list of paid subscriptions sooner or later (assuming they offered it).
- aneth4 13y agoI have no idea what The H is, however they seem to have a strong community? Have they tried the "we need money and to rails $50,000 before x or we will shut down" method? That seems to work for many popular sites, where people are happy to contribute $10-$100 for the value in their lives.
- vog 13y agoIndeed, I'm German and of course I know "Heise", but I never heard of their international part "The H!". I would happily pay some bucks regularily to support their journalism, but it seems they don't want my money. (or any other voluntary/donation money for that matter)
- lazyjones 13y agoThey have plenty of paid content you can buy, also gadgets, Arduino stuff, tool sets along with books and magazines in their shop (shop.heise.de). They don't seem to be very good at promoting these things though, probably because they put such an emphasis on their content (it's generally not littered with "buy this" ads).
- vog 13y agoI don't see how I could explicitly support "The H!" that way. How does Heise know that the customer wants to support "The H!" with that (and not, C't, iX or Heise Online)? Even if they don't have the right people in their team to run a donation/whatever campaign, they shouldn't have trouble finding those directly among their readers.
- JohnTHaller 13y agoThat would still only support them in the short term. They've likely been searching for a longterm revenue plan that didn't compromise their reporting style for a while.
- annnnd 13y agoWhy did I learn about this site only now, when it is closing? :( Looks very interesting, it's a shame.
- lambda 13y agoThat's sad. I was never a regular reader of the H, but when I did come across their articles, I found them very well written and informative. I'm surprised they haven't tried a subscription model like LWN. LWN has encountered similar problems, and been on the brink of shutdown before, but every time they have announced this they have subsequently managed to increase subscriptions enough to stay afloat. The nice thing about subscriptions as opposed to a one-time donation drive is that it becomes a sustainable revenue stream that they can depend on, rather than a one-time injection of cash that dries up quickly. LWN's subscription model seems to work really well. A subscription just means you get access to subscriber's only articles a week before everyone else; so if you don't need to stay absolutely on top of every development, you can read for free. There are different levels of subscriptions, ranging from $3.50/month to $50/month, so it's close to a "pay what you want" model (there are some slight differences in features you get at the different levels, but they are mostly equivalent). And subscribers are allowed to generate links that they can share with other people to content that is still subscriber-only, so you can still discuss an article if you feel like, submit it to HN, or the like; they just ask that people don't abuse it by providing a feed of all subscriber-only articles or something of the sort.
- sciurus 13y agoThis is a shame. The H was a great way to keep up with open source software news, and they had great feature articles. LWN also has great articles, but I don't know of anywhere else with similar quality news. http://www.h-online.com/open/ http://www.h-online.com/open/
- yapcguy 13y agoShould readers be firing up wget to archive the site, or does the Wayback Machine provide good enough coverage? http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://h-online.com http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://h-online.com
- auxbuss 13y agoDJ says the content will stay online[0]. [0] https://twitter.com/Codepope/status/358144985520025600 https://twitter.com/Codepope/status/358144985520025600
- nathanb 13y agoOne of my favorite things about The H is (was) that it always seemed to have a handle on how many news stories to run. Many of my RSS feeds (I'm looking at you, Ars) get skimmed simply because of volume. With the H, I generally at least peek at the article for each story. Other news sites come and go from my feeds (since for high-volume feeds it seems like the most important stories will bubble up through other, less chatty aggregators), but I always kept the H around due to the fact that it seemed to consistently run stories I couldn't find anywhere else. This is sad news.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- readme 13y agoWhy give up so easily? Put up some donation links and monetize it that way if so many people here love it.
- TempleOS 13y agoMy design is divine intellect on top of shit, uncompably brilliant. I have an india-nigger call center prison guard. God says... C:\TAD\Text\DARWIN.TXT sewhere published on this curious subject; but to show how singular the laws are which determine the reproduction of animals under confinement, I may mention that carnivorous animals, even from the tropics, breed in this country pretty freely under confinement, with the exception of the plantigrades or bear family, which seldom produce young; whereas, carnivorous birds, with the rarest exception, hardly ever lay fertile eggs. Many exotic plants have pollen utterly worthless, in the same condition a