For the curious, this acquisition was 18 years ago.
I dropped ars from my rss sometime around covid when they basically dropped their journalism levels to reddit quality. Same hive mind and covering lots of non technical (political) topics. No longer representing its namesake!
Happened 18 years ago.
This is a hot take that has become room temp.
As I mention in another comment, https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/01/exclusive-volvo-tells-u... is in a similar vein.
It is sad that this is what journalism has come to. It is even sadder that it works.
It feels like the human version of AI hallucination: saying what they think is convincing without regard for if it's sincere. And because it mimics trusted speech, it can slip right by your defense mechanisms.
Unfortunately, every review site uses affiliate links. Even organizations with very high ethical standards like Consumer Reports use them now. At least CR still gets most of its income from subscriptions and memberships. I guess that's something.
This is the real reason I don't trust sources that make money off affiliate links. The incentive is to recommend the more expensive items due to % kickback.
I haven't always agreed with them and sometimes the articles are clearly wrong because they're several years old, but they're usually good.
(I think I last seriously disagreed with them about a waffle maker.)
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.
Most bill in the US Congress are not actually meant to pass, they are just (often poorly written) PR stunts.
AFAIK the only real exception is Consumer Reports.
There was one “journalist” for the New York Times that reviewed cars, and he could never say anything positive about EVs - even to the point of warming consumers of the gloom that is EV. But after digging into his history, it was found he also published a lot of positive fluff pieces for the oil industry lol!
I think death threats are a bit too far.
But in that environment I have to applause Eric for sticking to the technical and not giving in to the angry mob think that surrounds him. A true tech journalist with integrity.
A mouth piece would be lauding Elon where uncalled for. I've never seen him do that, but feel free to prove me wrong!
Imo Eric Berger and Beth Mole are the only parts of ars worth a damn anymore. If they started their own blog I would be happy to pay a subscription to them
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Your comment reminded me of Dr Dobbs Journal for some reason.
Huge debt of gratitude to DDJ. I remember taking the bus to the capital every month just to buy the magazine on the newsstand.
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.
Actually, bugs in those listings were my first bug-hunts as a kid.
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.
At what point in the slide to authoritarianism should that stop? Where is the line?
This is exactly why us Israelis recoil at the anti-Israel demonstrations after October 7th. How the social media platforms were leveraged to promote the bully was a wake up call that we hadn't seen since 1938.
Yes, I enjoy "both sides" coverage when it's done in earnest. What passes for that today is two people representing the extremes of either spectrum looking for gotcha moments as an "owning" moment. We haven't seen a good "both sides" in decades
I don't see how one honestly argues in favor of an authoritarian government
It looks like they know how to grow an audience at the expense of discourse, because those adherent to the popular-online side will heavily attack all publications that discuss the other side. Recognising this, it is hard to seriously consider their impartiality in other fields. It's very much the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect.
"Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know."
-Michael Crichton
A perfect example is toilets - I don't care at all how well a toilet flushes golfballs, because I never flush golfballs.
Any specific examples? I took a quick browse but didn't find anything that fit what you're talking about, and what you're saying is a bit vague (maybe because I'm not from the US). Could you link a specific article and then tell us what exactly is wrong?
The personal blogs of experts.
> 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.
https://archive.is/2022.02.18-161603/https://www.anandtech.c...
Unfortunately, this is my impression as well.
I really miss Anandtech's reporting, especially their deep dives and performance testing for new core designs.
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.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Advance_subsidiaries
They own a depressing number of "local" newspapers to project excessive influence.
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
You seem to think it means “extra fantastic.” Not correct.
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.
But I think we do get his point regardless :)
In any single instance I don’t get very exercised - we tend to be able to infer what someone means. But the sheer volume of these malapropisms tells me people are losing their grip on our primary form of communication.
Proper dictionaries should be bundled free with smartphones. Apple even has some sort of license as you can pull up definitions via context menus. But a standalone dictionary app you must obtain on your own. (I have but most people will not.)
> Still a very good website
These are indeed quite controversial opinions on ars.
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.
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.
It's a shame because the old ars had a surprisingly good signal to noise ratio vs other big sites of that era.
By Condé Nast? Or did they get acquired again?
Controversial how?
They took a lot of value away from the communities at Reddit.com, too. Lots of us remember both.