alt Hacker NewsI 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.
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It 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-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-u... is in a similar vein.
They 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.
I 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.
A 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...
> 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.
> 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.
It's worse than that, Condé Nast is owned by Advance Publications.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Advance_subsidiaries
They own a depressing number of "local" newspapers to project excessive influence.
I 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.
I presume you meant "fantastic," not "fantastical"?
I 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.
> 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.
> they used to write fantastical and very informative articles
> Still a very good website
These are indeed quite controversial opinions on ars.
I 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
> 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.
Yeah, 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.
> the acquisition from Condé Nast
By Condé Nast? Or did they get acquired again?
> 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.