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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
A centralized system under intelligent, socially motivated, and extremely capable leadership is going to be capable of creating something about as close to a utopia as we can. On the other hand, a centralized system with self centered, foolish/myopic, corrupt, or just generally incapable leadership is going to be no less capable of creating a dystopia, whether by intent or even accident.
So if you believe that a governmental system can promote the best of society - then authoritarianism certainly has some draw. On the other hand if you think political systems are doomed to leave us picking between a corrupt idiot with dementia, and a narcissistic reality tv silver spooner, sooner or later, then you probably flavor more decentralized systems - with libertarianism being at the extreme end there.
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
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.
But I think we do get his point regardless :)
> Still a very good website
These are indeed quite controversial opinions on ars.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46990729
And the story from ars about it was apparently AI generated and made up quotes. Race to the bottom?
Everyone writes like Buzzfeed now because Twitter and Facebook made that the most profitable; Google/Twitter/Facebook need a constant stream of new links and incentivize publishing rapidly rather than in-depth; and Facebook severely damaged many outfits with the fraudulent pivot to video pretending they’d start paying more.
Many of the problems we see societally stem back to people not paying for media, leaving the information space dominated by the interest of advertisers and a few wealthy people who will pay to promote their viewpoints.
Phoronix comes to mind.
So, their main goal wasn’t to hide the comments, but push people to forums where there is a better format for conversation.
At least that’s how it used to work.
Still often good comments here, but certain topics devolve into a bad subreddit quickly. The ethos of the rules hasn't scaled with the site.
I mostly stopped paying attention to the comment section after that, and Ars in general.
Is HN really the last remaining forum for science and technology conversations? If so... very depressing.
Honestly, HN isn’t very good anymore either. The internet is basically all trolling, bots and advertising. Often all at once.
Oh and scams, there’s also scams.
Maybe this is exactly the issue? Every news company is driven like a for-profit business that has to grow and has to make the owners more money, maybe this is just fundamentally incompatible with actual good journalism and news?
Feels like there are more and more things that have been run in the typical capitalistic fashion, yet the results always get worse the more they lean into it, not just news but seems widespread in life.
Jonathan M. Gitlin
Ashley Belanger
Jon Brodkin
I wonder how soon I will be forced to whitelist only a handful of seasoned authors.
Twenty years ago?
https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/journalistic-standards...
(Paraphrasing: Story pulled over potentially breaching content policies, investigating, update after the weekend-ish.)
The original story for those curious
https://web.archive.org/web/20260213194851/https://arstechni...
I too quickly grew tired of the constant doomerism in his first term, but this one seems to be unmitigatedly terrible.
* They are often late in reporting a story. This is fine for what Ars is, but that means by the time they publish a story, I have likely read the reporting and analysis elsewhere already, and whatever Ars has to say is stale
* There seem to be fewer long stories/deep investigations recently when competitors are doing more (e.g. Verge's brilliant reporting on Supernatural recently)
* The comment section is absolutely abysmal and rarely provides any value or insight. It maybe one of the worst echo chambers that is not 4chan or a subreddit, full of (one-sided) rants and whining without anything constructive that is often off topic. I already know what people will be saying there without opening the comment section, and I'm almost always correct. If the story has the word "Meta" anywhere in the article, you can be sure someone will say "Meta bad" in the comment, even if Meta is not doing anything negative or even controversial in the story. Disagree? Your comment will be downvoted to -100.
These days I just glance over the title, and if there is anything I haven't read about from elsewhere, I'll read the article and be done with it. And I click their articles much less frequently these days. I wonder if I should stop reading it completely.
Absolutely zero discussion of why this might be a bad idea. It's not journalism, it's advertising.
Verge comments aren't much better either. Perhaps this is just the nature of comment sections, it brings out the most extreme people
All that said, this article may get me to cancel the Ars subscription that I started in 2010. I've always thought Ars was one of the better tech news publications out there, often publishing critical & informative pieces. They make mistakes, no one is perfect, but this article goes beyond bad journalism into actively creating new misinformation and publishing it as fact on a major website. This is actively harmful behavior and I will not pay for it.
Taking it down is the absolute bare minimum, but if they want me to continue to support them, they need to publish a full explanation of what happened. Who used the tool to generate the false quotes? Was it Benj, Kyle, or some unnamed editor? Why didn't that person verify the information coming out of the tool that is famous for generating false information? How are they going to verify information coming out of the tool in the future? Which previous articles used the tool, and what is their plan to retroactively verify those articles?
I don't really expect them to have any accountability here. Admitting AI is imperfect would result in being "left behind," after all. So I'll probably be canceling my subscription at my next renewal. But maybe they'll surprise me and own up to their responsibility here.
This is also a perfect demonstration of how these AI tools are not ready for prime time, despite what the boosters say. Think about how hard it is for developers to get good quality code out of these things, and we have objective ways to measure correctness. Now imagine how incredibly low quality the journalism we will get from these tools is. In journalism correctness is much less black-and-white and much harder to verify. LLMs are a wildly inappropriate tool for journalists to be using.
No, you just shipped the equivalent to a data-destroying bug: it’s all-hands-over-the-holiday-weekend time.
That helps ensure you don't forget, and sends the signal more immediately.
[0] https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/pull/31132#issuecom...
anybody else notice that the meatverse looks like it's full of groggy humans bumbling around getting there bearings after way too much of the wrong stuff consumed at a party wears off that realy wasn't fun at all. A sort of technological hybernation that has gone on way too long.