[HN Gopher] AnandTech Farewell
___________________________________________________________________
AnandTech Farewell
Author : janice1999
Score : 2137 points
Date : 2024-08-30 12:05 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.anandtech.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.anandtech.com)
| janice1999 wrote:
| I've been reading Anandtech for over a decade. Sad to see it go.
| prng2021 wrote:
| Same. It's so hard to stand out with a tech review site when
| there are dozens of other great ones, but this one truly did
| for me.
| ozaiworld wrote:
| Ahhh this is so sad. So many of my favorite online spots are
| ending recently.
|
| On a brighter note, Chips and Cheese are continuing the effort of
| quality technical journalism.
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| Ian Cutress (TechTechPotato) made an emotional goodbye video this
| morning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ud6DWmWcHaY
|
| Tangent: Interesting coincidence that this is ten years to the
| day of Ryan Smith's tenure.
| 9cb14c1ec0 wrote:
| The quality of their content, back when they still produced any,
| was top. It always felt to me that the life departed with Ian.
| Ian's substack fills the place for me that AnandTech used to.
| thefz wrote:
| Man, this is some sad, sad news.
|
| Goodbye, and thank you for the content that has accompanied me
| for more than a decade.
| drumhead wrote:
| Anandtech was the best place to get the full rundown of
| processors. Its really sad to hear its closing. Its going to be a
| huge loss to everyone.
| Symmetry wrote:
| Once upon a time Real World Technology was even better, but met
| the same fate. If you can write these sorts of reviews you can
| make much more money as a consultant than from a website.
| scrlk wrote:
| Happily the RWT forum remains up and active. It's an absolute
| goldmine for deep discussions on processors.
| bluedino wrote:
| Loved their MacBook reviews. And then eventually quit doing
| them.
| taspeotis wrote:
| > Finally, for everyone who still needs their technical writing
| fix, our formidable opposition of the last 27 years and fellow
| Future brand, Tom's Hardware, is continuing to cover the world of
| technology.
|
| I thought Tom's Hardware was very consumer oriented, and didn't
| go into nearly as much detail the way AnandTech did.
| NoxiousPluK wrote:
| They're afaik owned by the same company, so it makes sense to
| point people there.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I think Chips and Cheese is the real successor, but they are a
| small group with less throughput.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| What about Ars Technica? It used to be pretty in-depth. Not
| sure about lately.
| 3np wrote:
| https://www.servethehome.com/ has been scaling up their
| reporting as of late.
| jonatron wrote:
| Reviews for components are better in written form than video
| form, yet you can see by the number of YouTube views what people
| are using. I guess it doesn't help that it feels like there
| hasn't been an increase in performance to price ratio for GPU's
| in the longest time.
| cogman10 wrote:
| Or CPUs really. Die shrinks just aren't giving the advantages
| they once used to.
|
| You can see this in the fact that RISC-V and ARM architectures
| have caught up with x86 performance even though x86 has had a
| decade long head start and billions more invested in
| development.
|
| We are quickly approaching a weird space. Barring some major
| innovations, you are likely to see that 10 year old equipment
| remains competitive with brand new products in terms of
| performance.
| ozaiworld wrote:
| That might've been a result of Intel having the best leading-
| edge fabs until 2018 or so. It was hard to judge different
| ISAs before then.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Yeah I keep looking into upgrading my 12 year old PC, but for
| like PS1500 I can get one 10x faster (multithreaded) and only
| about 4x faster single core. I mean, that's a decent boost
| but it feels very disappointing for 12 years of progress.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > You can see this in the fact that RISC-V and ARM
| architectures have caught up with x86 performance
|
| Concerning RISC-V having caught up with x86 performance:
| dream on ... :-(
| VMG wrote:
| this was pretty impressive
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41364549
| kbolino wrote:
| ARM has gotten very good, and is definitely competitive with
| mid-range x86 while offering better performance-per-watt, but
| it is still not competitive with high-end x86.
| epolanski wrote:
| Depends on the task and what you're measuring.
|
| My M1 (standard) CPU is definitely faster than my Ryzen
| 7700x on some tasks, and it blows it away on perf/watt.
| fngjdflmdflg wrote:
| What do die shrinks have to do with ISA performance? Also,
| there are no RISC-V CPUs available that match the latest X86
| or ARM CPUs. Even then, the ISA chosen doesn't have much to
| do with the performance of CPUs (at least, when comparing
| major ISAs like X86, ARM and RISC-V).
| cogman10 wrote:
| Smaller nodes (generally) translate to lower power
| consumption, more transistor density, and faster transistor
| switching speeds.
|
| It allows for an architecture to deepen pipelines, add
| registers, add cache, and pull off tricks like SMT.
|
| > the ISA chosen doesn't have much to do with the
| performance of CPUs
|
| That's somewhat my point, the limiting factor for ISA
| performance is the physics surrounding the transistors.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| I can't stand watching videos on something I need information
| for <right now>. Maybe I'm just terrible at video scrubbing,
| but give me a long form write up and I can scroll or ctrl+f my
| way to what I'm looking for very quickly.
|
| I suppose they can't force inject 5-15 second ads though, so
| maybe folks like us brought this on ourselves.
| immibis wrote:
| There must be a market for video information converted to
| text. It would be completely illegal, of course.
| dbspin wrote:
| Well, there's a source if not a market - LLMs.
|
| https://www.proofnews.org/apple-nvidia-anthropic-used-
| thousa...
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| The irony of serving a video, consumed by a robot, to serve
| a human text, rather than serving the text in the first
| place.
| throwway_278314 wrote:
| Oh, but they can put blinky video ads all over the page so no
| matter where you look there are things to distract you.
|
| yeah yeah adblock pihole yes I know.
| hprotagonist wrote:
| yt-dlp audio only, and stuff that into whisper: video to text
| in ~30 seconds.
| imp0cat wrote:
| Sound like some sort of ADHD symptom where any video longer
| that a few seconds is perceived as too long, doesn't it?
| samsari wrote:
| No, it doesn't even remotely sound like such a thing.
| ryukoposting wrote:
| Not really. Video just doesn't lend itself well to
| searchability (is that a word?). YouTube's "table of
| contents" feature helps, but only when the video's creator
| actually uses it. Even if they do provide a ToC, it still
| doesn't help much if you're trying to find a particular
| sentence, or brief mention of a particular detail. Perhaps
| we also need videos with an index, in addition to tables of
| contents.
| imp0cat wrote:
| Right, but as I see it, there are multiple kinds of
| videos. Some are made specifically to be a vehicle for
| ads. You know what I mean, those 10+ minute long videos
| on simple tricks, where a short clip would suffice. They
| also usually lack any markers or chapters which makes
| skipping through them infuriating. I understand the rage
| here, I hate those with a passion, too.
|
| But some long videos are excellent, well-made and
| informative.
|
| Perhaps when the OP needs the info _right now_ he may be
| more stressed and less in control of himself?
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Videos absolutely suck for transmitting information, compared
| to text. I estimate that I can read an article about 10x
| faster than an equivalent video, they aren't even in the same
| ballpark. It boggles my mind that so many people prefer
| videos, given how much slower they are. It's enough to make
| me cynically wonder if people these days are illiterate or
| something.
| Schiendelman wrote:
| I suspect it's because they can't focus on text - their
| devices have 2000 notifications distracting them. Video is
| more easily engaging, they're less likely to switch away.
| ghaff wrote:
| I daresay thee average user would be a lot better off if
| they disabled all but a very small handful of
| notifications.
| lukan wrote:
| The average user likely does not know, that even the
| option exists.
| jsjohnst wrote:
| > I estimate that I can read an article about 10x faster
| than an equivalent video
|
| Especially due to all the filler b/s that every YT video
| has these days, be it over sharing their back story, Like
| and Subscribe! (And ding that bell!), sponsored ad reads,
| here's my ten other videos you need to watch, etc etc.
| bee_rider wrote:
| The only thing I'll say in defense of videos (which I
| generally don't like at all) is that when somebody makes a
| video, it does sort of force them to do the steps. I'll
| definitely take a well-written set of instructions over a
| well-written video usually. But a crappy video might
| accidentally be better than a crappy set of instructions
| because the steps that the author didn't think to include
| will at least be shown by default if they do it in one take
| with minimal editing.
| MostlyStable wrote:
| >in one take with minimal editing
|
| In my experience this is far more rare than a well
| written, comprehensive set of instructions.
|
| Even the tiniest youtube channel with 3 digit subscriber
| numbers recorded on the owners phone will edit out the
| "boring" bits. At least for any task that takes more than
| 2-3 minutes. If the task is short enough then yeah, they
| will often leave in the whole thing.
| yourusername wrote:
| >Videos absolutely suck for transmitting information,
| compared to text.
|
| It depends on the information. For DIY information for
| example i find it much better to see someone show how to
| lay brick or frame a wall than to read how it is done.
| flyinghamster wrote:
| I'd say that for mechanical topics (construction, car
| repair, etc.) a video can be very useful. But please,
| provide a written transcript, since that's at least
| searchable.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| That's fair. Video games are another thing which lend
| themselves pretty well to video content.
| iam-TJ wrote:
| More important than that is text lends itself to searching
| for possibly obscure phrases to narrow down the possible
| candidates before even having to "consume" any information
| whereas with video that is challenging and very inefficient
| (time and energy-wise).
| lukan wrote:
| Usually it is already very obscure, being presented with
| a video link in an debate at all. No thank you very much.
|
| Where I like a video, is for example of a teardown of a
| device. HowTo videos of practical skills. Watching a
| professional use his tools.
|
| But even then, I often prefer text with good pictures.
| ipsento606 wrote:
| Videos can be great where it's the kind of topic where
| you'd watch the whole video.
|
| Videos are terrible when you need a small amount of
| information that's embedded in a much longer video.
|
| The second scenario is much more common for me than the
| first.
| kranke155 wrote:
| The issue is there is a huge monetizing platform for video,
| which has minted multimillionaires.
|
| There is no equivalent for that for text, even though
| Substack is trying.
| tayo42 wrote:
| Discoverability is better for content creators on video
| platforms then text.
|
| If I wrote an article, what are even my options to share
| it?
|
| Video you, have YouTube, insti, tiktok etc to get
| discovered on and people can even find it.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Depends on what you need.
|
| I was once able to fix my toilet watching an Indonesian
| video. I understood approximately zero, but I could still
| follow that guy's hands.
|
| It is a different story with programming or other
| abstract/text-based tasks, but when it comes to anything
| done with hands, I like a video better.
|
| 3blue1brown videos on maths are beautiful as well. I wish I
| had them when I was 18.
| geoffeg wrote:
| I'm always surprised at how many non-tech people don't know
| about their browser's ability to search in the page. I've
| been on multiple calls at work with researchers who have been
| in the field for more than a decade and they'll read the
| entire page instead of hitting ctrl-f.
| Am4TIfIsER0ppos wrote:
| > terrible at video scrubbing
|
| It is partly the form, video, but more so the access method,
| the network. All networked video sucks at skimming through
| because the file isn't cached and takes a few milliseconds to
| several seconds to load the part you jumped to. The interface
| also doesn't help because usually they lack controls for
| skipping forwards and backwards and long jumps forwards and
| backwards.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Google has been trialing AI overviews of youtube videos,
| essentially it opens a gemini chat where gemini has been
| prompt-stuffed with the whole video.
|
| A 12 minute "Here is my favorite method for unclogging a
| drain" video becomes a three sentence reply from gemini
| telling you what it is.
|
| I don't know how google is gonna get this past creators if
| they fully role it out, as it is a massive shameless
| backstab, but at the same time it is wonderful for viewers
| who don't want to trudge through filler video after clickbait
| headlines.
| sitkack wrote:
| Wow, it is a backstab! They force creators to make longer
| videos or they won't get monitized and then do this.
| Creators get paid by the watch minutes.
| yazzku wrote:
| Text -> video -> text
|
| It's come full circle, just that the wheel now consumes
| orders of magnitude more power to churn the final text.
| arprocter wrote:
| I didn't realize how bad this has gotten until I was looking
| for a GPU undervolting guide
|
| What could be a couple of paragraphs is stretched into a 5-10
| minute video; most of which is explaining what it is, and not
| how to do it
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > I can't stand watching videos on something I need
| information for <right now>. Maybe I'm just terrible at video
| scrubbing
|
| Do not worry: in a very short while we'll all have AI tools,
| running locally, that can summarize videos in textual forms
| in a split second.
|
| Prompt: _" Summarize this vid in five paragraphs. List
| specs."_
|
| It already exists. In a short while we'll all have this at
| home.
|
| P.S: prompt: _" Remove every single ad and submarine content
| too"_.
| thrwaway1985882 wrote:
| Replacing "downloading 2kb of text on a device with minimal
| technical specs" with "buying a top-end computer to
| download hundreds of megabytes of video & shove it into an
| LLM to mangle and hallucinate the message down into 2kb of
| text".
|
| Thank god for progress. What would we do without it.
| Sakos wrote:
| I'm waiting for it to become more convenient, but no joke
| this is what I've been doing. When I find interesting
| videos about software development, I'll often use Whisper
| to create a transcript and then upload it to Claude to
| summarise, then I can ask it questions about the content as
| well as explore related topics and ask it for further
| reading.
| zelos wrote:
| I never understand the obsession with video. It's the first
| thing my kids reach for when searching for information about
| something and it's always painfully slow and inefficient.
|
| Does 5 minutes of side by side videos of GPUs playing a game at
| 120fps, encoded as a 60fps video, really help anyone?
| glenndebacker wrote:
| The ridiculously high prices of GPUs have really taken the fun
| out of hardware for me. I used to follow hardware developments
| closely, but now I upgrade much less often so that also
| stopped.
| btbuildem wrote:
| I think it's a generational thing. It seems like short-form
| videos are the only thing majority of people are willing to
| consume.
|
| I've noticed more success with classifieds that have a video vs
| ones with a thorough description. I've always made efforts to
| include all relevant information in a post, and it recently
| dawned on me (while answering a dumb question) that a lot of
| people just don't read anymore.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Which generation? My parents really like video (boomer/genx
| line), but I prefer text (millennial). Not sure what the kids
| these days like, although I do recall some students (gen z)
| that really wanted videos for setting up basic stuff, like
| how to download VSCode.
| syndicatedjelly wrote:
| I can see that. Television was the newest thing for the
| boomers, and was a big deal for early Gen X. Later Gen X
| and Millenials got the Internet, which in its infancy, was
| too slow to display anything other than text and crappy
| graphics. Once video became virtually free to transmit, we
| started seeing a lot of video-based content saturate the
| waves again.
| emn13 wrote:
| I think that shift can be explained not as any outright
| consumer preference, but rather as a form of
| platform/advertiser preference. It's hard for a standalone
| website to compete with a platform in the best of cases, and
| better yet, it's relatively easy to make ads lucrative in
| video perhaps since the format simply lends itself better to
| being both in your face, yet short enough to get out of the
| way.
|
| In the very unlikely hypothetical that youtube were to allow
| other formats such as articles or images, I suspect many
| publishers would be able to make that work - on that plaform,
| as opposed to on a standalone website without the traffic
| attracting algorithm to help crowdsource valuable content for
| users.
| Macha wrote:
| If you look at e.g. GamersNexus, Hardware Unboxed, etc. the
| videos aren't really short form in that "10:02" way. Like
| there's plenty of detail, but 30 minutes with 15 minutes of
| it being looking at graphs is clearly a pretty slow way to do
| it compared to see they literally just presented the video
| script in article form and you could choose the graphs and
| time that matters to you.
| Farfignoggen wrote:
| Both Gamers Nexus and Hardware Unboxed(Techspot) have
| Websites where they post all the related images/analysis(in
| text format) from their respective video content, and more!
| And so why are you not doing your due diligence before
| commenting!
| cma wrote:
| > yet you can see by the number of YouTube views what people
| are using
|
| Doesn't help that Google search results spam videos they make
| money from in a carousel at the top of almost every query.
| cuu508 wrote:
| DC Rainmaker (sports gadgets reviews) has a nice compromise of
| having product video reviews on Youtube, but also even more in-
| depth reviews with all the tables and charts on his website. I
| used to read his written reviews, now I mostly skim his videos.
| doe88 wrote:
| First it was written reviews, then it was youtube videos, soon
| it will be short fast paced TikTok clips.
| kllrnohj wrote:
| Interestingly Gamers Nexus is using the YouTube video & merch
| money to fund an (ad-free!) written article site:
| https://gamersnexus.net/
|
| It never seems to rank in search results, though, so it's easy
| to forget it exists... But it makes a lot of sense. The charts
| & script is already created anyway for the video, just edit it
| a bit to fit written form better and you're basically done
|
| The speed at which it loads without all the ad, tracking, and
| analytics bullshit is amazing. Especially on mobile.
| epolanski wrote:
| Also, I never saw half an ad on anandtech, or never noticed..
|
| Which is what I liked about it, but possibly doomed them.
| arnath wrote:
| Man this is sad ... I think I've been visiting this site for its
| entire lifetime. AnandTech has always been the best place for
| unbiased, deeply technical looks at hardware and it will be
| greatly missed
| uptownfunk wrote:
| Wow the end of an era. I first heard about it at Cal through
| college roommates. I haven't used it much lately but still.. sad
| to see it go.
| codeslave13 wrote:
| A sad day. My buddy and I were the original developers of
| anandtech when it went live running on cold fusion and oracle as
| the backend. I started a hosting company and hosted anadtrch for
| a few years. Lots of memories there.
| yas_hmaheshwari wrote:
| Wow! Out of curiosity, which year was it?
| archon810 wrote:
| I would guess somewhere around 1997 when Anand started the
| site.
| codeslave13 wrote:
| Yea we worked on his old site before anadtech. Sheesh so much
| fun at CES with the gang in lv. Was fun times. My buddy
| started fusetalk by writing anadtech forums from scratch. It
| all moved to .net after a couple years and that when i left.
| Jason stayed on for years
| perfectstorm wrote:
| you forgot to answer the question though :)
| codeslave13 wrote:
| Oops. Early 96 if i remember correctly. Its been a while
| :)
| robk wrote:
| I remember religiously checking the hot deals forum then for
| insane dot com boom pricing choices (and errors). Fun times. A
| bunch of us moved to IRC but then Fatwallet sort of ruined
| things w their volume of users.
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| Where does that community exist now?
| j45 wrote:
| It was super ahead of it's time with all the crazy
| functionality and connection.. flowed together really smoothly.
|
| I think there's a need for this kind of thing still, if you
| have a passion for it you should consider reimagining what kind
| of content could be needed in 2024.
|
| YC seems to like the kind of esoteric knowledge you probably
| have.
| codeslave13 wrote:
| I retired from tech after 40 years this spring. Im now a
| farmer in the middle of nowhere.
|
| The big thing i see missing from long ago times is a real
| sense of community and an all in one site ( article , forums
| etc). They try and some are decent but there just isnt the
| connection and i dont think that will ever return. I think
| reddit and the like sucked all that away from sites and the
| audience is much much broader so i feel they lose some of
| that "likemidedness" i dunno im just old and cant really
| relate to the younger "techies" of today.
| markbnj wrote:
| Sad to read this, but all things pass I guess. Spent a large
| chunk of my life posting on and reading the AT forum. Last I
| checked I still have a mod account. Things sort of started to go
| downhill for me with the sale to... meh can't even recall the
| purchaser it's been so long. Farewell AT, thanks for all the good
| advice on builds and overclocking through the years.
| jackcosgrove wrote:
| I'm glad to hear the website will stay up, for now.
|
| This makes me wonder if there's a way to preserve websites
| indefinitely in ebook form. A small device that contains the
| entire history of a website, and is self-contained in the ebook.
| The device would obviously require power and the hardware could
| degrade, but this could be mitigated by making the hardware
| replaceable, or rather the content swappable across devices.
|
| It seems like a middle ground between durability/portability
| (printed book) and usability/access (website).
| mistrial9 wrote:
| those reading this that have the means -- consider a recurrent
| donation to archive.org
| immibis wrote:
| Or, you know, a computer file you could download and view on
| your computer.
| technojunkie wrote:
| My journey into building computers and networking were partly
| driven by Anandtech. I bought and sold quite a few things on the
| forums, too. I always thought Anandtech was one of the higher
| quality tech publications. RIP to one of the best.
| reginald78 wrote:
| I'm glad to hear the forums are still going to be around. They
| certainly aren't as popular as they once were but I still
| consider myself a part of that community and enjoy conversing
| with the old timers once and awhile.
| Sesse__ wrote:
| Extremely sad. There basically is nothing like Anandtech; the
| depth, the ability to explain, the lack of sensationalism, and
| the integrity in benchmarking (I still vividly remember when they
| noticed an issue with HPET in Windows affecting their benchmarks,
| and promptly pulled all of them offline until they could
| reassess). Chips and Cheese is great but only covers a certain
| segment of it.
|
| In the end, I would assume it just boiled down to lack of money.
| There were people among us who would gladly pay for this kind of
| coverage, but Anandtech said at some point they had considered it
| and couldn't find a good model. (As an aside, I pay for LWN, and
| I would pay for something that covered similar areas to Phoronix
| but actually was good.)
| a-french-anon wrote:
| Same. Paying for LWN but I get a bit annoyed when there's the
| lone Phoronix-tier clickbait about diversity amongst all the
| high quality kernel reports.
|
| Phoronix could get a lot better if it stopped clickbaiting
| (which attracts the most feebleminded parts of the peanuts
| nogrammer gallery in the comments) and labelled -> aggregated
| its benchmarks according to SIMD support/enablement, threading
| and type (CPU, GPGPU, 3D, etc...). And investigated strange
| issues in results instead of drowning readers in data.
|
| Basically, we need something in-between Phoronix and
| ChipsAndCheese for benchmarks.
|
| Also reading Igor's Lab and GamerNexus when I want some data
| about hardware, but it's Windows focused, sadly.
| phoronixrly wrote:
| At this point I suspect if Phoronix suddenly takes a turn and
| stops being clickbait blogspam, it would be alienating its
| core audience... People that love to read ragebait and argue
| aimlessly in the comments.
| Sesse__ wrote:
| > And investigated strange issues in results instead of
| drowning readers in data.
|
| The basic problem of Phoronix is that it doesn't have the
| capacity nor competence to do this. Journalism is expensive
| and takes time, and Phoronix is a single person. If they were
| to actually go in and investigate every strange issue they
| had in their benchmarks (assuming they even notice them!), or
| add reasonable commentary beyond the seemingly autogenerated
| "in benchmark X, device Y seems go be ahead", they would have
| to cut the number of articles and benchmarks drastically.
| Kind of like Anandtech, really; one of my main gripes with it
| is that there just wasn't _enough_ of it per unit of time.
| pas wrote:
| Diversity as a topic and problem space has became undeniably
| important though.
|
| Of course it's not an easy topic, does not really lend itself
| to the usual reporting methodology of LWN. I wholeheartedly
| agree that many times it is completely counterproductive to
| post/host content that tries and fails to engage with
| diversity, because - as you pointed out - even the mention of
| it gives that ugly sour taste when browsing a site.
|
| Yet the topic won't really lose its salience as long as the
| problems themselves are either "solved" or something crowds
| them out.
|
| I trust that the LWN editors are aware of this, and are not
| doing it for the clicks. So I think it's completely fair
| (more so necessary for progress) to critique bad takes on
| diversity, but I think it just leads to frustration to try to
| "wish it away".
| steve-rambo-fan wrote:
| Diversity of _opinion_ and _experience_ is extremely
| important. Not diversity of your bedroom preferences or any
| other superficial characteristics that have no relation to
| technical qualities. Saying otherwise is racist and *ist by
| definition.
|
| Comments on those articles always go down the shitter. I
| petitioned the editors to disable commenting on them, and
| you can do the same -- politely and humbly, of course.
|
| The contact information is on the website, whoever wants
| to, will find it easily.
| Nullabillity wrote:
| If a place somehow ends up _only_ employing people
| wearing brown shirts, isn 't that a bit odd?
| tredre3 wrote:
| > Phoronix could get a lot better if it stopped clickbaiting
|
| I've been reading Phoronix for years and I don't recall
| seeing clickbait. Most of the time the titles are just quotes
| from the sourced article he links to.
|
| Even skimming https://www.phoronix.com/news I see no
| clickbait?
|
| Was it something they did in the past? Or is the clickbait
| specific to benchmarks, which I have no ability to interpret?
| BoingBoomTschak wrote:
| https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linus-Torvalds-Bcachefs-
| Regret... clearly fabricating a juicy title by
| intentionally misinterpreting one of Linus' sentences. Just
| for the aforementioned peanut gallery watching two egos
| colliding like they would watch WWE.
|
| https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-Split-X.Org-Session
| reporting about a pretty pointless change just to get that
| sweet Wayland/X11 drama driven flaming.
|
| Clickbaiting may have been the wrong word, there's not much
| of that, more "feeding drama to an audience he knows well"
| than anything. The comment section is almost Wccftech tier,
| these days.
| spinningslate wrote:
| From TFA:
|
| > If anything, the need has increased as social media and
| changing advertising landscapes have made shallow,
| sensationalistic reporting all the more lucrative.
|
| And your comment:
|
| > There were people among us who would gladly pay for this kind
| of coverage
|
| It's Friday so I'm going to be optimistic. I'd like to think
| (maybe fantasise) that we've passed the low point of ad-
| fuelled, sensational, information-light, polarised, vacuous
| content. There are some promising shoots, from paid newsletters
| (e.g. stratechery plus [0]) to search (e.g. Kagi [1]). There
| are early signs that Browsers are coming back as a topic with
| Chrome's inexorable slide into increasingly obfuscated ways to
| slurp data [2] and the (very) early promise of e.g. ladybird
| [3] as the first genuinely new, ground-up browser for years.
|
| It's never going to be mainstream. As someone once wrote here,
| the economy is a machine that incessantly drives cost down.
| Orthodoxy says you can't get cheaper than free - but that
| presumes measuring cost solely in monetary terms. Widen the
| definition of "cost" though and what we have now is definitely
| not free: we pay with loss of privacy, social disfunction and
| mental health degradation among others.
|
| Challenging the commercial behemoths who benefit from the "free
| internet" myth is a massive task. Perhaps unassailable. If
| there's an upside, it's that the long tail - where quality,
| paid for content and services might thrive - is simultaneously
| meaningful enough to support a small but thriving industry, and
| small enough to be uninteresting to the 1000lb gorillas.
|
| That may be fantasy per above. But I'd rather cling to
| something hopeful.
|
| [0] https://stratechery.com/stratechery-plus/
|
| [1] https://kagi.com/
|
| [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41391412
|
| [3] https://ladybird.org/
|
| --
|
| EDIT: fixed grammar.
| wickedsight wrote:
| > we've passed the low point of ad-fuelled, sensational,
| information-light, polarised, vacuous content
|
| I'm a bit more pessimistic I guess. Netflix at one point felt
| like the end of piracy, because it was becoming the portal to
| all great video content. Then everyone wanted a slice of the
| pie and started their own platform. Now, Netflix is starting
| to fill up with 'sensational, information-light, polarised,
| vacuous content' and they really seem to want to become ad-
| fuelled.
|
| I also dislike that I have to choose between giving up all my
| privacy to a ton of ad providers or needing 100 different
| subscriptions to get some good content.
|
| I kinda hope that Mozilla (or someone else) finds a way to
| become the Spotify/Netflix of the web. A place where I can
| pay a single fee that then gets distributed between the
| platforms and sites I visit. But I kinda know that that will
| never happen, since it gives too much power to that one
| platform.
|
| For a while I thought that blockchain/crypto might be a good
| way to fix this. But nobody seems to be building blockchain
| stuff to do the right thing, they only do it to rip people
| off.
| throwaway237289 wrote:
| > I also dislike that I have to choose between giving up
| all my privacy to a ton of ad providers or needing 100
| different subscriptions to get some good content.
|
| > I kinda hope that Mozilla (or someone else) finds a way
| to become the Spotify/Netflix of the web. A place where I
| can pay a single fee that then gets distributed between the
| platforms and sites I visit. But I kinda know that that
| will never happen, since it gives too much power to that
| one platform.
|
| You mean you want... the cable TV bundle again? Literally
| the thing that the article rails against, because cable TV
| inherently produces "sensationalism, link baiting, and the
| path to shallow 10-o'clock-news reporting."
|
| Amazing.
| wickedsight wrote:
| > the cable TV bundle again?
|
| No, that's why I didn't write that. Spotify allows nearly
| everyone to put their music on the platform. Just this
| week I listened to some music with <1000 plays that I
| found in a random video somewhere. I choose what I want
| to listen to and a part of the fee I pay gets transferred
| to the creator. I don't need to buy 100 different
| subscriptions to labels and musicians, it's centralized.
|
| (Yes, I know Spotify isn't perfect and that there are
| valid criticisms of the platform. I'm not using it as an
| example of a perfect end goal, I'm using it as an example
| of the only thing right now that gets somewhat in the
| neighborhood. And in the industry there are multiple
| platforms who distribute mostly the same content with
| only some 'exclusive' releases. Which is what I'd like to
| see for the web.)
| ghaff wrote:
| It was totally predictable that many of the same people
| who hated on the cable bundle also hate on a fragmented
| streaming landscape even though they probably pay
| significantly less than they did for cable TV unless they
| _also_ pay for live TV anyway. (And they 'd also hate on
| an all-inclusive integrated streaming service for the
| hundreds of dollars a month it would cost.)
| wickedsight wrote:
| > though they probably pay significantly less than they
| did for cable TV
|
| Might be a bit of a cultural difference though. I'm in
| the Netherlands. TV was never as expensive over here as
| in the US. We also got spoiled, I guess, because the hits
| from the US were also on TV over here but the smaller
| shows weren't, so we'd get the biggest shows from Fox,
| CBS and Comedy Central on the same channel in some cases.
| And from what I remember this was <$20 a month.
| ghaff wrote:
| I paid about $100/month for cable TV in the US and that
| wasn't with a bunch of premium content. (Maybe just HBO.)
| That was Comcast so I assume that was pretty typical. And
| then any streaming channels, movie rentals (which were
| mostly not on standard cable), etc. were on top of that.
|
| And when I canceled cable TV I decided to just go cold
| turkey and do without the occasional sporting event on
| live TV. So depending upon how you count I'm probably
| paying less than $50/month for all my video entertainment
| these days.
| geodel wrote:
| > Might be a bit of a cultural difference though.
|
| It is more of content owner trying to get what they can
| from different part of the world. There are places in
| third world where HBO would be $1 / month , same thing in
| US is like 15-20 dollars. Buyers/local networks can
| always say this is price local market can pay else they
| will pirate.
| hightrix wrote:
| I would LOVE a streaming bundle that included all the
| content for a discount if and only if it remained ad
| free.
|
| The big draw for me for streaming is not price, it is
| removal of ads.
| matwood wrote:
| > or needing 100 different subscriptions to get some good
| content
|
| Cable still exists. People wanted the ability to sub to
| whatever they wanted (often leaving out sports for
| example). That's happened and now people want it all in one
| place. It turns out what people want is everything in one
| place for free, which is leading Netflix to have an ad-
| tier. Though, re-bundling is going to take some time as
| consolidation happens.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| Don't worry by the way, cable boxes, Netflix, and
| televisions will give away your privacy even if you pay
| mlindner wrote:
| You don't get past the ads, but over-the-air TV still
| exists and is technologically impossible to track you
| individually.
|
| Also, if you're connecting your TV to the internet,
| that's a "you" problem.
| ensignavenger wrote:
| Cable is laced with advertising and is linear, whereas
| much of the world has moved on to on demand. Further,
| what folks always wanted back in the days before
| streaming was the ability not to pay for genres they
| didn't want. Netflix had a reasonable low price for a
| while so it was worth it even if you only really watched
| one or two genres they had, and ignored the rest of the
| content. But with higher prices, it is ever more
| difficult to justify. Disney used to offer Disney, Hulu,
| and ESPN separately or as a bundle, so if you didn't
| watch sports, you could just get Disney and Hulu. Or if
| you just wanted Disney, you could get that. But they have
| raised prices and increasingly pushed bundling.
|
| I for one would be perfectly willing to have an option
| where I could get Westerns for 2 or 3 bucks a month,
| Action/super heros for 2 or 3 bucks, SciFi for 2 or 3
| bucks, Romance/RomCom for a buck. Kids/cartoons for a
| buck or two etc. And then choose what I want to subscribe
| to each month. But if you are going to charge me 20 bucks
| a month, you had better have 20 bucks a month worth of
| content that I actually want to watch. (and no ads). Oh,
| and stop making good shows with cliff hanger endings and
| then canceling them!
| dylan604 wrote:
| > Cable is laced with advertising and is linear, whereas
| much of the world has moved on to on demand
|
| As a counter, there is a trend of linear streaming
| channels increasing in popularity. Lots of people just
| want to put something on for a bit of time rather than
| doom scrolling on-demand to find something to put on.
| There have been times where I've spent the majority of
| the time I was willing to kill watching something
| searching for something to watch. Curated channels with
| content that your interested in is very compelling.
|
| > I for one would be perfectly willing to have an option
| where
|
| These are definitely out there. I worked on the backed in
| for something that did this very thing. There was a
| channel for nothing but old western TV shows. Another
| channel that was nothing but animal related content.
| Another that was basically a Hallmark channel with
| similar content. I never did see what their pricing was
| though
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Beyond the providers still offering linear TV (and the
| new ones being built in a new "trend" sometimes referred
| to as FAST TV [1]) You can see some of the linear
| background channel desires/trends in Twitch streaming
| numbers, too, and in some of the popularity of some
| Twitch streaming channels (such as MST3K's 24/7 MST3K
| channel). Also this is part of why several big "comfort
| events" on Twitch such as 24/7 streaming of Bob Ross or
| Mr. Roger's Neighborhood blew up virally.
|
| [1] https://www.mni.com/blog/popular-streaming-services-
| what-is-...
| eitland wrote:
| Actually for most part I don't want to subscribe.
|
| And I don't want free ad sponsored.
|
| I just want to pay a reasonable (I'll get back to this)
| price for the things I actually want.
|
| Netflix was OK with me (and I think a number of others)
| _despite_ being a subscription service not because it was
| a subscription.
|
| It was OK because it was
|
| - the only option
|
| - reasonably priced
|
| - and had "everything" one wanted
|
| So what is reasonable?
|
| I'd assume that with all the cost savings given the
| digitalization of the delivery at least it shouldn't be
| more expensive than renting a physical dvd, although I'd
| accept if they adjusted a little for inflation.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| So use the Apple TV store (formerly iTunes Store). There
| you can buy nearly anything from any studio, and you pay
| per episode or per season. Whether the costs are
| reasonable or not is in the eye of the beholder but I
| don't feel ripped off by it.
| encom wrote:
| >buy
|
| Nothing is for sale at the Apple TV "Store". You pay for
| a license to stream a piece of content, that lasts until
| Apple or the content owner decides to revoke it.
| walterbell wrote:
| Has any Apple TV purchase been revoked?
| dwighttk wrote:
| Not sure...
|
| I have a bundle of Downton Abbey that is no longer for
| sale on iTunes and I can play it, but (for a while, they
| may have fixed it) at the end of an episode you had to
| navigate to the next episode by selecting the show and
| scrolling horizontally through every single episode.
| Technically possible but very irritating.
|
| (Funny thing: I was watching the show when the switch
| happened... I watched two or three with the obvious play
| next episode in series behavior and then it suddenly
| stopped working... apple support finally told me it seems
| like it was related to it being taken off in favor of a
| bundle with the film included.)
| taylodl wrote:
| Meh. Videotape wears out. Video discs break. Books yellow
| and age and rot. No content you have ever bought lasts
| forever.
| cesarb wrote:
| > Books yellow and age and rot. No content you have ever
| bought lasts forever.
|
| Many libraries all over the world have books which have
| lasted for centuries, far longer than a single person's
| lifetime. The books I bought as a child can last longer
| than my own body. That's close enough to "lasting
| forever" for most practical purposes.
| taylodl wrote:
| Centuries-old books have had special care to preserve
| them.
|
| If you want your personal books to last most of your
| lifetime, then there needs to be a modicum of care taken,
| which isn't always possible, especially while you're in
| transit and moving from one place and into another. How
| many books have been lost that way?
|
| The whole point was someone lamenting digital license
| _may_ not last forever (though Apple 's has, so far) and
| I'm just reminding everyone that physical media doesn't
| last forever either.
| HappMacDonald wrote:
| Part of the concern is "I can keep it longer if I take
| care of it or if I keep track of it properly", eg if it
| gets lost or ruined its due to some lack of care by the
| end user, vs "I only get to keep it until some third
| party decides I don't get to have it any more".
| taylodl wrote:
| Then buy physical copies of everything. Oh sure, you lose
| a huge convenience factor, but at least no third party
| has control over it.
| robotresearcher wrote:
| They _can_ but many do not in practice. Lots of the trade
| paperbacks I bought in the 1970s and 80s fall apart now
| if I actually read them.
| eitland wrote:
| That is my current solution.
|
| Still there is a number of things I cannot buy or rent.
| rincebrain wrote:
| The tl;dr is that we've demanded things with such
| enormous production costs that were basically almost
| entirely subsidized on a socialized model, where the big
| appeal of the big ones subsidized the costs of the less
| successful ones, in a way that would make them not
| reliably financially viable in isolation.
|
| But the content that is so specific it only appeals to
| 1-10% of people is both the most memorable and also often
| the content that is basically guaranteed to not hit for
| 90% of people. So your math on who's going to pay to
| consume it changes drastically when the ceiling is so
| much lower, especially when the effective price required
| is so much higher that it's going to drive even more
| people away.
|
| So it's a much larger risk pool to hope you'll make your
| money back with the error bars so much narrower, and
| businesses being businesses, they go for the bland thing
| with a lower risk pool 99% of the time, and then wonder
| why their returns keep shrinking.
| MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
| > It turns out what people want is everything in one
| place for free
|
| I'd say this is provably false based on the popularity of
| streaming services, specifically the rise of Netflix's
| streaming service. That is the opposite of free.
|
| Netflix is not offering ad tiers due to a lack of
| subscribers; they are doing it because there were a
| handful of quarters where revenue stagnated. This does
| not mean it was a bad business model; it means they want
| _perpetual_ growth to satisfy shareholders. Same old
| story.
|
| The reasons cable was and is bad and was destined to be
| replaced:
|
| - No ability to unbundle (as you said)
|
| - Messy time-shifting (DVRs, PPV, all that nonsense)
|
| - Complicated and limited setup (proprietary hardware;
| extra fees for multiple devices; no ability to view on a
| computer or mobile device)
|
| - Tons of fun trying to cancel
|
| Cable has two real advantages:
|
| - Fast channel switching
|
| - Garbage exclusivity contracts
|
| Streaming doesn't solve exclusivity but it certainly
| doesn't make it worse. In fact, making it easier to
| subscribe and cancel makes it significantly better.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| _It turns out what people want is everything in one place
| for free_
|
| No, it doesn't "turn out" that way at all. But if the
| pirates provide better service for free than the
| proprietors offer at _any_ price, that can hardly be seen
| as my problem.
|
| For a few brief, shining years, it looked like the media
| and entertainment industries were starting to understand
| that. Turned out not to be the case, though.
| fzingle wrote:
| Our economic model encourages this kind of race to the
| bottom enshitification of everything. Unfortunately there
| are no high-tech solutions to this problem. The technology
| we need to improve is our political/economic system.
|
| Perhaps with wealthy country populations projected to fall
| dramatically we will finally be forced to find a way other
| than "growth" to value human endeavour. That would be the
| most likely path to a solution, I fear it will be rather
| painful.
| irdc wrote:
| Our economic model (is supposed to) boil down to
| producing our goods and services using the least amount
| of resources. Sure, that yields planned obsolescence and
| enshittification, but also cheap multi-GHz laptops and
| widespread Internet availability.
| steve-rambo-fan wrote:
| Brave is building something that sounds like it might be
| right up your alley, but adoption of their payment system
| has been rather low, and I doubt Mozilla has enough street
| cred to be more successful after the last ten years of
| their mismanagement and the market share hovering just
| above 0%.
| MostlyStable wrote:
| If Mozilla's market share is an impediment to the
| adoption, then have I got some bad news for you about
| Brave....
|
| (I say this as a happy user of Brave on Android)
| whartung wrote:
| > needing 100 different subscriptions to get some good
| content.
|
| Mind this is sort of how it used to work.
|
| Outside of broadcast TV and radio, you either subscribed to
| everything (newspapers, magazines, newsletters) or you
| bought them ad hoc one by one at the newsstand.
|
| A problem with modern subscriptions is that they auto
| renew, and thus can be hard to cancel, and they tend to be
| quite expensive (everyone wants a "mere" $10/month).
| willyt wrote:
| >...or you bought them ad hoc one by one at the
| newsstand...
|
| 100% This is what is missing. I don't want to subscribe
| to the New York Times for PS90 per year because I only
| want to read about 5 to 10 NYT articles a year. Why can't
| I pay PS1.50 for 15 articles? That would be about the
| same as buying a physical copy of a paper from a
| newsagent; if I buy a physical copy I probably read about
| that many articles from it before it gets recycled.
| Instead I either don't read the article I've found to or
| I try to find it on the internet archive which is really
| irritating. I would like to read articles in a range of
| papers; say 3-4 UK broadsheets, occasionally some
| international papers like the NYT, Le Monde and a couple
| of trade papers. If I subscribed to 4 UK broadsheet
| newspapers I would already be paying >PS400/year in
| newspaper subscriptions. Who does this? I can't
| understand why newspapers can't see that no-one wants to
| be spending that sort of money and why they can't come up
| with a better solution. If the problem is card fees on
| micro transactions why don't they club together and
| create some kind of patreon type thing that agglomerates
| transactions together?
| twoWhlsGud wrote:
| Post News tried this and failed. Not sure why.
| sgerenser wrote:
| There was also Blendle which I thought was a great idea,
| but it flopped: https://www.pugpig.com/2023/08/18/why-
| micropayment-champion-...
| jaredwiener wrote:
| Because there's a difference between what people say they
| want and what they actually want.
|
| Micropayments do not work. They've been tried over and
| over, but generally speaking, they aren't helpful. Users
| don't really use them, and they don't actually help the
| publisher/author long term.
|
| FWIW I've been working on a startup with a different
| vision, but trying to make news profitable:
| https://blog.forth.news/a-business-model-for-21st-
| century-ne...
| Terretta wrote:
| It can't be conscious site by site. It has to be a toggle
| or setting that's a browser standard, backed by your IAP
| platform of choice, and pages check then drop the paywall
| and don't show ads. Call it IWP, In-Web Purchase, total
| up fractional costs until it makes sense to charge them,
| then charge them, on the same user/device IAP platform
| rails.
|
| Most importantly, the cost has to be no more than the
| site would get for serving that visitor ads.
|
| This is where the break is. On a per content or per month
| basis, sites want to charge individuals orders of
| magnitude more than they charge advertisers. No avid
| reader (those most likely to be happy to pay!) can afford
| the same footprint of reading that content is happy to
| give them through ads. And so, content is writing for
| ads, not readers.
|
| It's self defeating.
|
| . . .
|
| PS. I bookmarked https://www.forth.news/topstories ...
| it's not how I find / read content, I need much higher
| density (somewhere between https://upstract.com/ and
| https://www.techmeme.com/) and if I want a personal feed,
| there's feedly and its kin, but what I personally do is
| something like this socially curated discovery except
| generated by a process something like Yahoo Pipes that
| scavenges an array of tentacles into the newsosphere. But
| I see what you're doing there.
|
| This kind of experimentation is awesome. Will come back
| and see how hard it is to "make it my own". Thanks for
| sharing your position essay!
| brewdad wrote:
| I gather you are outside the US, so my solution likely
| doesn't apply. For those in the US, check your local
| library's digital offerings. Mine offers 3 day access to
| the NYTimes web site for free. There is a bit of a
| friction as I must first log into my library account and
| click a link. Then I have to log into my NYTimes account
| if I'm not already. Bam! Full access to everything for 72
| hours. It can be endlessly renewed if that's your thing.
| I tend to use it about once a month.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _I gather you are outside the US, so my solution likely
| doesn 't apply. For those in the US, check your local
| library's digital offerings._
|
| Libraries in some larger cities will let you have a
| guest/out-of-town library card for a fee, which is often
| far less than the cost of subscribing to the digital
| content the library offers.
| aworks wrote:
| I'd also like to subscribe to some rate-limited plan for
| newspapers, magazines, and newsletters. I can usually
| find some workaround but it's too much hassle to do that
| for all the sites I'd like to read (and where I would be
| willing to give some limited amount of money).
| reaperducer wrote:
| After being away from it for a couple of years, I checked
| out Apple News+ again, and it's added a lot of newspapers
| and magazines in the time I was away.
|
| The newspapers are almost all American, with a smattering
| of Canadian, but there seems to be a ton of British and
| Australian magazines.
|
| It might be worth checking out to see if what's on offer
| matches your interests.
|
| Unfortunately, unlike Apple Music, it doesn't have a web
| client. https://www.apple.com/apple-news/
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| Didn't Apple just layoff a ton of people in this group?
| pineaux wrote:
| Internet Archive is irritating. Just archive.is it and
| 9/10 times it's already archived. Especially with
| articles here on HN. And if it's not archived it will be
| archived on the spot.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| I used to buy magazines in the 90s that cost upwards of
| $6-8 a magazine each, that's $18 in today's dollars.
|
| You want access to multiple large reporting agencies work
| but want to pay less than a fraction of the non-adjusted
| 1990s prices. Your better solution has zero way to work
| financially. Imagine saying 'why do I have to pay for a
| whole buffet, I only pick from 5-10 of the buffet dishes
| that I pick and choose as I walk down the line, I don't
| take something from all of them. I should pay like fifty
| cents.'
| jaredwiener wrote:
| Exactly!
|
| The economics of journalism are constantly misunderstood
| here. People want thoughtful, insightful, investigative
| stories of the non-obvious (or so they say) but also do
| not want to pay for the dead ends that a reporter has to
| find to get there.
|
| Journalism is more like hard-tech research than SaaS. You
| don't necessarily know what you're getting into when you
| start reporting, and getting something of value can take
| an incredibly long time. The actual writing of an article
| or shooting of a video is the last part of a long
| process.
|
| Unlike hard-tech, the result often has a very short
| shelf-life. It's not going to continuously earn payouts
| for the reporters/news outlet for more than a couple of
| weeks (at best) after publication.
| kelnos wrote:
| Last year the NYT cost $2.50 at the newsstand. GP wants
| to pay ~$1.50 for 15 individual articles. There are more
| than 15 articles in a single edition of the NYT, so that
| sounds pretty reasonable to me.
|
| Hell, bump it up to $2.50/yr for those 15 articles/yr,
| same price as a single physical edition. GP would
| probably still be ok with that, and that doesn't seem
| unreasonable.
|
| I'm not sure what magazines you were buying in the 90s
| for $6-$8 each, but they were certainly on the high end
| and not representative of your average newspaper, which
| were on the order of 35-50C/ at the time. Full-color
| glossy mags cost a lot more to produce than a newspaper,
| so I'm sure that's part of it.
| eptcyka wrote:
| Much like with books, the 10-15 best sellers a publisher
| has fund the thousands of duds. Newspapers are as cheap
| as they are because the filler content gets subsidized by
| the good stuff. And it is rare that a publisher will know
| what is good before it is released.
| thesnide wrote:
| I used to buy all those gaming and elctronics magazines
| as a kid. But as a group of a dozen, we paid each a part
| of it, and it was timeshared.
|
| Now try that with e-zines that are full of DRM
| jaredwiener wrote:
| > I can't understand why newspapers can't see that no-one
| wants to be spending that sort of money
|
| NYT adds 210,000 digital subscribers in Q1.
|
| "The company said it had about 10.5 million subscribers
| overall for its print and digital products at the end of
| the first quarter, up roughly 8 percent from a year
| earlier. About 640,000 of those were print subscribers,
| down about 10 percent from the same period last year. "
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/08/business/media/new-
| york-t...
| kelnos wrote:
| I don't subscribe to the NYT, but I do have a WaPo
| subscription. I'm considering canceling it. Most of what
| I read I can get syndicated elsewhere, or the same
| information presented with similar quality, elsewhere,
| for free.
|
| (Plus I'm tired of further lining Bezos' pockets, and I
| very much disagree with some of the current editorial
| staff.)
|
| I get that real, actually-solid journalism is not cheap
| to make. But I'm not sure what the solution is when good-
| enough articles can be had for far cheaper, or free. The
| good stuff really is a joy to read, but I'm not convinced
| $120/yr (looks like it's twice that for the NYT?) is
| worth the price of admission.
|
| Certainly a lot of people do buy and keep these
| subscriptions, and subscriber counts do seem to be
| growing (which is genuinely great), but I would wager
| that far, far, far fewer people today have a newspaper
| subscription than in the mid-90s. But maybe that's
| changing; maybe people hate all the sensational,
| clickbaity, in-your-face ad-supported garbage floating
| around for free.
|
| I would only hope that as online publications grow their
| subscriber base, instead of getting greedy, they actually
| _lower_ their prices, since their marginal per-subscriber
| cost is near-zero. Given that NYT home delivery prices in
| 1995 were ~$350 /yr, (~$700 in today's dollars), it seems
| a little absurd that they're charging 35% of that (for
| digital) when their cost of distribution is a fraction of
| a percent what it used to be. Presumably the reason
| behind that is because their subscriber base is much
| smaller than it used to be?
| lukan wrote:
| "> we've passed the low point of ad-fuelled, sensational,
| information-light, polarised, vacuous content"
|
| I am also a bit pessimistic about this, but rather think
| the danger comes from LLMs making even more convincing
| clickbait and "facts". Cheap, easy to consume, if there are
| enough clicks, there is enough ad money.
|
| Something real was misrepresented, so there was a lot of
| outcry? Awesome, lots of clicks. Lots of money. We can
| later apoligize, that the LLM summarizing made a misstake
| there.
|
| As long as ads dominate where the money comes from for
| newspapers, not much will change.
| abakker wrote:
| I think another alternative here, is the existence of
| broad spectrum "summary as a service" is that "content
| for content's sake" and blog spam and SEO become less
| relevant.
|
| Maybe not, but I hope so.
| lukan wrote:
| Oh there will be for sure lots of nergy wasted, on
| producing long text out of nothing - and on the other
| side using lots of energy to make LLM summarize that
| garbage again.
|
| But yes, I also hope some good will come out of it and
| intent to stay in the good areas.
| dageshi wrote:
| > Netflix at one point felt like the end of piracy, because
| it was becoming the portal to all great video content. Then
| everyone wanted a slice of the pie and started their own
| platform.
|
| In other words, we got competition. If Netflix remained the
| sole streaming platform of significance it would be lumped
| in with the monopoly talk that clouds Google, Amazon, Apple
| and the other trillion dollar corporations.
|
| If anything this is a good thing, competition happened
| before Netflix could dominate completely.
| zer00eyz wrote:
| > If Netflix remained the sole streaming platform of
| significance it would be lumped in with the monopoly
| talk....
|
| Spotify, Google, Amazon, Apple, Tidal all manage to have
| almost comprehensive music catalogs for me to stream.
| It's rare that I find something on one platform that
| isn't on another (Some artist exceptions exist, and are
| rare).
|
| Pick 10 random films off the AFI top 100 list and tell me
| how to stream them. How many services do I need to watch
| them "for free".
|
| Consumers want a single point of access to content. If I
| want to listen to a song I go to my music platform, if I
| want to watch content I go to the web to find out who has
| it... That friction is what consumers dont want or need.
| dageshi wrote:
| That's because music costs barely anything to create vs
| tv/movies and the digitally distributed track is
| basically just advertising for the music creators merch,
| sponsorship deals, live gigs where they make their real
| money.
|
| You can tell that's the case because practically every
| piece of music created has been put on youtube while
| nobody puts tv/movies on youtube for free.
|
| So your spotify equivalent for tv/movies is going to cost
| $100+ a month, perhaps more because tv/movies are that
| much more expensive to make and that's what you were
| paying for cable back in the day.
|
| But people think everything could cost $20 at most, so
| that's why we're going to have 10 or so streaming
| services and frankly that's way better than the old cable
| days.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| No, that's because music licensing has been collected
| together into one or two monopolistic licensing schemes
| in every country. Most countries do it via a government
| agency, the US does it with BMI and ASCAP. It's actually
| kind of surprising the US hasn't broken up BMI & ASCAP
| with anti-trust, but they've got special dispensation
| just like the NFL.
|
| Legislatures could bring in a compulsory licensing scheme
| for movies similar to BMI and ASCAP.
| dageshi wrote:
| I am no expert on licensing schemes, but I've seen major
| artists like Taylor Swift remove their catalogues from
| Spotify and the like, which tells me they're not that
| compulsory when it comes to online streaming?
| metabagel wrote:
| Taylor Swift has unusual market power.
| zer00eyz wrote:
| CD's used to cost 20 bucks, artists used to make money on
| their sales.
|
| Now they don't.
|
| There are movies that "don't make money" because of shady
| accounting practices.
|
| And I paid 100 bucks for cable for the same reason that
| you pay 100 bucks for internet now, lack of competition.
|
| > while nobody puts tv/movies on youtube for free
|
| There are plenty of people creating content on YouTube
| for what YouTube is willing to give them... and that
| isn't much. They have a working model because they keep
| creating content, not trying to squeeze every drop from
| the juice (over and over).
|
| You might want to go back and look at the Paramount
| Decree. We would not be here if it was extended to
| streaming rather than allowed to expire.
| LinXitoW wrote:
| Almost all criticisms of monopolies comes from the abuse
| they enable. On an abstract level, a monopoly is the best
| option, because it removes so much extra cost, and has
| the ultimate scaling factor. Like early Netflix with it's
| seemingly infinite catalog.
|
| In practice, of course, monopolies under capitalism exist
| specifically to exploit it, making things far worse for
| customers in the long run.
|
| Steam is, to me, the closest we have to a benevolent
| monopoly. A monopoly that exists purely because it offers
| the best product.
| dageshi wrote:
| Yes well the definition of "monopoly" seems to vary a bit
| on HN, often it means "large company I don't like".
|
| I've heard people on this site argue that Apple has a
| monopoly on smartphones because they don't like Android
| and so their only choice is iPhone and since Apple
| controls iPhone 100% it's therefore a monopoly.
| atmavatar wrote:
| I suspect people make that argument because they are
| unaware of the word duopoly. Functionally, a duopoly
| isn't much different from a monopoly. The market would be
| _far_ better off if there were 4 or more players.
|
| In the context of smartphones, the vertical integrations
| don't help with the "monopoly" perception, either. Once
| you've decided to get an iPhone hardware device, your
| only choice is to use the Apple app store, and if you
| want something out of the Apple app store, your only
| choice is to get an iPhone. Android phones are a little
| more lenient in that there are at least multiple app
| stores, but you still have the tight coupling between the
| hardware and the OS despite smartphones fundamentally
| being ARM devices with touchscreens.
|
| Were smartphones more like PCs, you could buy an iPhone
| and put Android on it, then use any of the iOS, Google
| Play, or Amazon stores to install apps. Or, perhaps you'd
| prefer to buy a Samsung Galaxy S24 and put iOS on it, and
| install apps from any of the many app stores just the
| same.
|
| I'd be at least as irritated with the PC market if I had
| to buy a Dell PC to access Steam and it _only_ allowed
| installing from Steam, an HP PC was linked 1:1 with the
| Epic store, Alienware PCs were linked 1:1 with the Origin
| store, etc. and building your own machine was no longer
| possible, though at least you 'd still have more options
| than with phones.
| invsblduck wrote:
| > Were smartphones more like PCs, you could buy an iPhone
| and put Android on it, then use any of the iOS, Google
| Play, or Amazon stores to install apps.
|
| It's never been like that. What you wrote is
| fundamentally the same idea as: "If consumer computers
| more like consumer computers, you could buy a MacBook Pro
| and run RedHat Linux on it, then run any of the macOS
| applications or Linux applications that exist in the
| world."
|
| While the mobile computing ecosystem and details are
| quite different, it's mostly same cocktail of things:
| Commercial hardware that is either open or closed, a
| [maybe commercial] OS, and applications that execute
| under version X of the OS and version Y of a runtime.
| naasking wrote:
| > In other words, we got competition. If Netflix remained
| the sole streaming platform of significance it would be
| lumped in with the monopoly talk that clouds Google,
| Amazon, Apple and the other trillion dollar corporations.
|
| This "competition" increased prices, which is not the
| desired result from competition. The problem is that
| copyright holders have too much power over their content,
| especially older content. If copyright holders were
| required to license content to anyone who wished to
| publish or redistribute it after, say, 10 years of
| initial publishing, _that_ would be a form of competition
| that would decrease prices.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| > _This "competition" increased prices_
|
| That would have happened anyway.
|
| The only reason early Netflix was so cheap was because
| they negotiated streaming access to large swathes of
| content, because the rights holders thought licensing for
| streaming was worthless and leased them for a pittance.
|
| That sweetheart deal was never going to last past
| Netflix's original gen contract expirations.
| OJFord wrote:
| Some competition, in the wrong place.
|
| Exclusive licencing is the problem, giving a 'monopoly'
| of sorts on streaming particular content. If everything
| was available everywhere, they just paid pay per view
| royalties say, then we'd have proper competition on
| pricing models & the quality of service provided.
| kbolino wrote:
| Steam has locked up the gaming market on PCs and so far
| it has been all upside. The decline of Netflix and the
| proliferation of generally worse alternatives has not
| been a boon for anyone but rent-seekers. This theory of
| competition is not holding up here.
| short_sells_poo wrote:
| I think Steam is an anomaly, not the rule for monopolies.
| Steam is privately owned with long term stable
| leadership. They are generating a crazy amount of money
| and are able to be content with that.
|
| If steam went public and had the usual revolving door of
| MBA CEOs keen to "maximize efficiencies", you can bet
| that Steam would turn just as malign as the adtech
| industry.
| kbolino wrote:
| I concur on all points, though I think there's something
| else than public ownership at fault per se. Publicly
| traded corporations were once considered an innovation
| and improvement over private ownership. Something went
| awry over the years, and private equity is presently
| giving a bad name to private ownership too.
| autoexec wrote:
| > Steam has locked up the gaming market on PCs and so far
| it has been all upside.
|
| GoG exists too, and just like what happened with
| streaming services, gaming companies have pushed out
| their own shitty platforms full of DRM and spying. Steam
| is still #1 though.
| hadlock wrote:
| The barrier to entry to compete with steam is a newspaper
| ad, a CD-R writer (or usb stick) an envelope and a stamp.
| There are a million ways to deliver software. You can
| setup a website as a front to an S3 bucket and then just
| pay per download of the file. You have epic, origin gog,
| greenman gaming etc they all exist, but people choose to
| buy their games on steam, and publishers choose to sell
| their games there despite the 30% cut. I wouldn't call it
| "locking up", they just provide a Better Service to
| customers.
|
| The last game I bought that wasn't on steam was probably
| Kerbal Space Program, in ~2014, and later converted my
| key to Steam when the option presented itself.
|
| *Epic offers 0% cut for the first year to most indie
| games
| autoexec wrote:
| > In other words, we got competition.
|
| No, we got fragmentation. If we had competition I could
| pay netflix to watch the same content that I could
| otherwise watch on hulu if I made the choice to pay hulu
| instead.
|
| Since everyone has their own exclusive content paywalled
| off behind their own services, we're stuck with lot of
| tiny monopolies.
|
| That's why prices are skyrocketing, and we have a bunch
| of examples of shitty/infuriating interfaces that get in
| the way of users and prevent them from what they want,
| instead of a battle between streaming services to offer
| the best/most features users want at the lowest prices.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| I think we're past _a_ low point of ad-fueled low-value
| content. Better alternatives will arise, grow, and become
| ubiquitous - but then they too will grow more expensive,
| become corrupted, and be circumvented in turn.
|
| Media, art, and info distribution are never static targets,
| and even if a stable equilibrium exists and can be reached
| that does not mean that society will not oscillate around
| it.
| oska wrote:
| > Netflix at one point felt like the end of piracy
|
| I think you have it the wrong way round. Piracy is _the
| solution_ to Netflix (the bloated, enshittified 'content
| provider') just like piracy has been the solution to all
| the centralised media platform monopolies that came before
| it, that Netflix first disrupted _and then joined_.
|
| As an individual it's meritorious to pay creators and pay
| creative collectives (e.g. studios). But it's never
| meritorious to pay media platforms that act as middle men.
| They are in the business of ripping off _both_ the creators
| _and_ their audience ( 'consumers' in modern parlance).
| You're only a sucker if you buy into their self-serving
| moralising narratives. The right and moral thing is to
| parasite them to death, by piracy. (Or boycott them; also a
| valid choice.)
| tstrimple wrote:
| Nope. They had it exactly right. Notice the past tense.
| You're just adding more context to what they said. I was
| able to skip out on usenet for quite a while during the
| Netflix golden years because Netflix made consuming
| content much easier than pirating at the time. But it's
| back to where things were before and we've got better
| tools for "alternate sources" of such content.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| I've wondered if things might get bad enough to enable a fork
| of the web. It could happen 2 ways:
|
| 1) A truly user focused browser is created, the fabled "user
| agent". The ad-focused web doesn't support that browser, but
| websites that care about users do support it. Thus, people
| who want more than ad-drivel use the niche browser and have
| access to a web full of weird and non-profit-focused content.
|
| 2) Possibly a fork of the underlying technologies. Maybe the
| browser mentioned uses incompatible technologies or
| protocols. Maybe this new web is based on something other
| than HTML and JavaScript.
|
| Probably not. It's a wild idea. It's probably too hard to do
| better than the existing technologies, and the effort
| required for such a fork seems ever less likely in this time
| of dissipating focus and hobbies.
| krapp wrote:
| It already exists, it's called Geminispace:
| https://geminiprotocol.net/
| eikenberry wrote:
| Gemini is still client/server, so it encourages the same
| problems of scale that HTTP has where you can't afford to
| run a server unless you have a source of income. IE. it
| would get infested by adtech the same as HTTP if it got
| popular enough. IMO the only way to get something that
| wouldn't suffer the same fate would be to make it a peer-
| to-peer application where everyone using the client
| application was also hosting a server.
| codersfocus wrote:
| web3 is that. Pay for content / services you use through
| micro transactions.
| nullsmack wrote:
| "web3" is nothing but another crypto-scam.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Arbitrary server-chosen microtransactions make things
| worse in many ways even if the payment process is simple,
| fast, and free.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Please stop.
| eitland wrote:
| If by web3 you mean crypto currencies then I ask you
| nicely to stop using web3 for that.
|
| Web3 is things like json-ld and the like and it is tragic
| that scammers have been able to abuse the term for so
| long.
| shwaj wrote:
| I'm not familiar with json-ld, other than a quick skim of
| a Google search that I just did. What is so revolutionary
| about it (and other technologies in the space, such
| as...?) that it represents a whole new revision of the
| web paradigm, comparable from the shift from static pages
| in web1 to interactive sites in web2?
| eitland wrote:
| It is not revolutionary. It is evolutionary just like
| web2.0 was. That is kind of the point.
|
| But together with other, similar technologies it extends
| the current with metadata etc web just like web2 extended
| the existing web with things like ajax interactions, drag
| and drop and folksonomies ("tags") and other forms of
| user generated content.
|
| The (IMO) fake crypto peddler "web3" is (again IMO)
| "revolutionary" unlike web2 and the real web3: it is a
| complete break from many of the things that made the web
| great. I'd even hesitate to describe much of it as web at
| all.
| lxgr wrote:
| I'm really not a fan of crypto claiming the "Web 3.0"
| title, but the Semantic Web had its chance for many
| years, and at this point I don't think it gets to hold on
| to it anymore either.
| codersfocus wrote:
| Wow, lots of luddites here for what's supposed to be a
| tech community.
|
| Get your head out of your asses guys. There's nothing
| inherently bad about blockchain or decentralization.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| I never believed that internet advertising was worth what it
| supposedly is. Stuff like this seems to confirm it for me:
| https://www.adexchanger.com/on-tv-and-video/googles-
| second-w...
|
| I think internet advertising is massively overvalued, the
| initial bubble happened when the click fraud detection tools
| were nonexistent, and because Google hasn't been changed,
| everyone assumes their valuation is right and correct.
| autoexec wrote:
| internet advertising as a means to sell garbage is
| overvalued, but it enables a system of pervasive
| surveillance that allows governments and companies to
| exploit your data offline too. As long as the tracking
| continued, the buying and selling of the most intimate
| details of your life would still be a massive and growing
| industry even if no one ever put an ad on a webpage again.
| Advertising is also effective at manipulating public
| perception/opinion though so it's not going anywhere either
| way.
| widowlark wrote:
| ++++++ to Kagi.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| I kind of like the OutsideOnline model where I pay for the
| apps (trailforks gaiagps) but also get access to decent
| content. Though I guess that is close to the old cable TV
| bundle model that sucked.
|
| I pay for Kagi, NextDNS, Youtube to keep ads at bay. If there
| was a bundled content network beyond just Youtube
| infomercials posing as content it would be even more
| appealing.
| Terretta wrote:
| People would pay for far more if charged a nominal markup
| over what their readership is considered worth when
| subsidized by ads.
|
| But no, when subscribing, they're expected to pay 10x or 100x
| or 1000x their ad-impression worth.
|
| Subscription aggregation (a Hulu of things to read, like the
| firm Apple purchased* and made into Apple News+) is one
| answer.
|
| Another would be a IWP (In-Web Purchase) browser standard
| like DNT except its an _" I'm willing to buy the ad slots on
| this page at the median CPM"_ token, coupled to something
| like the mythical micro-transactions settlement schemes of
| yore that would now actually be possible on top of systems
| handling IAP.
|
| * _Next Issue_ aka _Texture_. I was a subscriber:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texture_(app)
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| >There were people among us who would gladly pay for this kind
| of coverage
|
| While strictly true, it almost certainly would only be a tiny
| fraction. Probably not far off from the small fraction that
| would visit their site without ad-blocking.
|
| I know people don't like hearing it, but the "I never want to
| see an advertisement again...and I don't have to" mentality
| that exists, especially within anandtechs tech minded
| demographic, does have material downsides.
|
| I'm not saying you shouldn't block ads, but I know 99% of you
| reading this have never whitelisted a single domain.
|
| Now crucify me for pulling a skeleton out of the closet.
| asaddhamani wrote:
| If a site offers a reasonable priced alternative to ads I'll
| opt for that. I've donated at other times when that option is
| available.
|
| Otherwise I don't want to be tracked profusely. Ethics is
| sorely missing in online advertising.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| This comment (not from you personally, Asad, but the idea
| of it) is the very core of the reason why I have such an
| axe to grind on this topic.
|
| One brings this ugly topic up, that ads keep sites running,
| and are showered by comments of people saying exactly what
| you said. Those comments get praise and lots of upvotes.
| Everyone pats themselves on the back.
|
| But when you are on the other side of the equation, the one
| dependent on ad views and/or subscriptions, the numbers
| unequivocally show that people are totally full of shit.
| That they are just virtue signalling to receive praise and
| to push the skeleton back in the closet.
|
| Again, not calling you out personally, I believe you do
| support creators. But I have done this song and dance many
| many times, and it always goes the same way.
| ghaff wrote:
| Also, back in the day, some of us had a fair number of
| magazine subscriptions. But, really, at peak it was a
| small percentage of the number of websites I look at at
| least now and then. Consumption has generally changed and
| most of us are skittish about subscriptions generally
| even if we have a few.
| drew870mitchell wrote:
| The whole mode of taking in trade news has changed. 20
| years ago when i bought a Maximum PC i read it cover-to-
| cover. Can't imagine doing that now with anything other
| than a book or a movie. Instead i'm reading the one or
| three most eye-catching articles that twenty different
| publications put out. Our much-beloved RSS (and old-
| school email newsletters) were the start of the slide
| here i think.
|
| I still have a few subscriptions, especially if they send
| it out on a dead tree, but with the nature of the
| internet it's hazardous to not use an ad blocker. I've
| come to appreciate when publications run reminders that
| they are, in fact, also people who need to eat, and i try
| to make up for what i take from the trough by buying swag
| or sending a check if they take donations. But i get that
| there's not an enviable business plan on the other side
| of that equation. It's an ongoing evolution.
| giantrobot wrote:
| > Our much-beloved RSS (and old-school email newsletters)
| were the start of the slide here i think.
|
| I'd place the shift happening earlier with early web
| portals. People made (or were coerced by their ISP) web
| portals their home page. The model of portals was show
| people headlines with direct links to the articles.
|
| Hyperlinks are fundamental to the web so it's not like
| portals were doing something _bad_. It is just a model
| that 's difficult to monetize for the destination site.
| More difficult than a traditional magazine or newspaper
| since the site only gets paid per _actual_ impression vs
| paid per square inch from _potential_ impressions
| estimated by circulation.
|
| RSS readers were more about the democratization of
| portals since a site feed let the end user build their
| own "portal" from their collection of feeds. In terms of
| traffic patterns an RSS user was pretty similar to a web
| portal user, just a visitor that dropped in on some deep
| link and didn't necessarily hit any additional pages.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > the numbers unequivocally show that people are totally
| full of shit
|
| What numbers?
|
| Where can I pay to replace ads with something that isn't
| orders of magnitude more expensive? Basically any single-
| site subscription I've seen fails that test. If you're
| citing that kind of subscription, then that evidence
| doesn't work here.
| happyraul wrote:
| The only one I've found that passes my test (no ads if
| you subscribe, and equally important, all the tracking
| crap is also gone), is ArsTechnica. I check the stories
| several times a week, so I'm happy to subscribe under
| those terms.
|
| For every thing else I use adblockers.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| That's why the saying " _actions speak louder than words_
| " exists...
|
| In any marketing research it is well-known that what
| people say they would pay for and what they _actually_
| pay for are two different things. Hence also the mantra
| about MVPs and going to market as soon as possible.
|
| But specifically on AnandTech and "written journalism", I
| think they are right about the "written" part. These days
| the topic and hardware reviews are all over Youtube.
| tensor wrote:
| I'm not sure what skeletons you think are being pulled
| out of the closet. I do the same as the OP, if there is
| an option to pay I do that, but I will always ad block. I
| feel for you if you can't make money without ads, but I'd
| rather see the world burn than be ad driven.
|
| I pay for many many subscriptions for content I like.
| Also, I don't see any "virtue signalling" anywhere. I
| don't want ads because they are hostile and not in my
| best interest. They significantly lower the quality of my
| life. It's as simple as that.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| You cannot see the virtue signalling unless you see the
| traffic metrics and revenue sheets.
|
| Everyone says they pay to support, very few people
| actually do.
|
| Just look at how it is a matter of course to post an
| archive.is link anytime a pay walled article is posted.
| It's so pervasive and wide spread that people don't even
| think about it.
| literallycancer wrote:
| It's not your customers' fault that your business model
| is not viable, and guilting people into turning off
| AdBlock is manipulative and detrimental to overall human
| productivity. Asking people to watch ads is simply a bad
| trade off, in the same way that burning trash to save on
| fuel is bad -- to save 1$ in fuel costs, environmental
| damage in the thousands is caused. To make 1$ from ads,
| many multiples of damage in lost productivity and bad
| product proliferation are caused.
|
| Ad based businesses are as bad as door to door life
| insurance scammers, multi level scammers, etc.
|
| In short, find a job that doesn't require damaging other
| people.
|
| /Forgot to mention, watching ads without buying the
| advertised product simply decreases ad yield over time
| and therefore it even wastes productivity for 0 return in
| the long run./
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| The virtue signaling part of online tech discourse is
| probably my biggest dissatisfaction with it these days. I
| hope you're using Kagi because Google is unethical oh and
| using Matrix because Discord is evil oh but you're using
| Gemini because the web is all cursed and sorry you're
| using Signal for your private communications right?
| Twitter is evil now Mastodon right? Hope you aren't using
| Reddit but Lemmy. "Enshittification!!"
|
| Meanwhile the numbers show where the users actually are.
| I pay for YouTube, Telegram, and Nebula, self host
| Matrix, use and run Bluesky infrastructure, and a few
| other things but I'm the first to admit I'm in the
| minority. Not only that but it's time consuming!
| Meanwhile in tech discourse everyone is using Kagi for
| everything and "it's a breath of fresh air" or whatever.
| tstrimple wrote:
| A huge part of this is because there is often no other
| option to pay, and when there is there's a ton of
| friction involved. We know how much little frictions add
| up when people are trying to buy a product. They have to
| have even more impact on someone who wants to donate. I
| definitely spend more on my Apple devices due to easy
| Apple wallet integrations. I'm not going to pretend like
| I'll go out and start donating to all of these websites.
| But if the anti-popup blocker modal had something as easy
| as an Apple Pay button, I'd definitely consume more of
| that style of content if the fees were reasonable.
| pbronez wrote:
| The best (and only) implementation of this I've seen is
| https://all3dp.com/
|
| If you visit with an ad blocker, they say "please disable
| your blocker or subscribe for $3/year. Hit the subscribe
| button and you can Apple Pay and be reading a 100%
| ethically as free article in seconds.
|
| Obviously transaction costs totally suck at prices that
| low, but one transaction a year helps I'm sure.
| inhumantsar wrote:
| That model sounds great. Low friction and impulse-buy
| pricing.
|
| There are lots of sites (AnandTech being a prime example)
| I don't visit often enough to justify the usual monthly
| subscription cost.
|
| Per-article pricing with no registration would be ideal
| (yet another cryptocurrency use case that never
| materialized) but as you say, transaction fees make that
| a non starter.
| RealStickman_ wrote:
| I have the next issue of always deleting cookies when the
| browser closes, meaning I'd get this dialog every time I
| visited the site. Whitelisting a site in Firefox is
| relatively annoying and throw in multiple devices, that
| dialog will always be there.
|
| I don't really have a better idea besides automated
| micropayments, which nobody has managed yet, crypto
| doesn't count,, so I guess we'll have to live with the
| current situation?
| krapp wrote:
| I mean, HN keeps saying commercialism has destroyed the web
| and anyone who creates content for it should do it for free
| as a hobby or not at all. So I guess someone here with enough
| free time and enthusiasm is bound to do just that.
| dageshi wrote:
| Exactly, I'm sure these hobbyists will be jumping in any
| day now to replace what was previously done by paid
| professionals.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I particularly felt Anandtech was a particularly bad example
| of an advertising supported site because, more than any other
| site, when I was browsing it in my iPad I would try to click
| on a link and it seemed almost every time the layout would
| shift and KA-CHING I'd click on an ad accidentally.
|
| Maybe it is just paranoia, they never asked permission to
| access the accelerometer, but it happened so consistently I
| wondered if they had something that would detect the motion
| that comes before a click and shifted the layout
| deliberately.
| tdb7893 wrote:
| I don't use an adblocker because I'm not entitled to the
| content. If seeing the ads makes the site not worth it I just
| don't go to that site, these sites won't learn until people
| stop using them. I've had a lot of people ask me how and
| honestly the web isn't that bad of you just don't spend all
| your time on crappy sites.
|
| I'll often ask people with ad blockers what sites they pay
| for and depressingly often they say they don't pay for any.
| Coming as no surprise to anyone that has worked with
| customers before, what people say they'll pay for and what
| they actually will pay for are very different.
| kibwen wrote:
| I don't use an adblocker out of entitlement. I use an
| adblocker because I don't want to be tracked, I don't want
| to be surveilled, I don't want my information
| hoarded/sold/leaked, I don't want to be influenced by
| legions of marketers looking to hijack my monkey brain, I
| don't want to be scammed by paid ads masquerading as
| organic content, and I don't want to expose myself to yet
| another vector for malware.
|
| From a user perspective, ads are all downside, no upside. I
| pay for my content _and_ I use an adblocker, and that 's
| the only way to survive on the internet these days, because
| the ruthless pursuit of profit by short-sighted
| surveillance capitalists has ruined advertising as anything
| approaching an ethical business model.
| tdb7893 wrote:
| I mean yeah if you pay and want to use it to also block
| trackers then go for broke, I've never heard of anyone
| having a problem with that.
| jabwd wrote:
| Problem with that approach is that an adblocker is actual
| critical anti malware software.
| somethingreen wrote:
| The article states fairly clearly that they've lost to
| clickbait (and, I would guess, increasingly, to AI-slop).
| I.e. it was advertising that defeated them, not the ad
| blockers.
|
| The fundamentally corrupt business model has grown big enough
| to reach its own tail and has been happily chomping on it for
| a while. Now it's getting to the juicy parts.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| It's because click-bait is what attracts people who don't
| have the mind for using ad-blockers. It also attracts
| advertisers that offer more diverse (and often more
| malicious but profitable) ads.
| zchrykng wrote:
| > I'm not saying you shouldn't block ads, but I know 99% of
| you reading this have never whitelisted a single domain
|
| And I never will. Sites should offer a pay option, not
| require that their users submit their data to intrusive
| tracking all over the web. If no one is willing to pay for
| their stuff, well I'm sorry that they are so bad at creating
| good content.
| renewiltord wrote:
| HN user offers to pay $1.99/year for many carefully done
| review. Amazed that no one want to take deal.
| kzz102 wrote:
| I kept thinking that Anandtech could have survived if they had
| not been part of a corporate ownership. Because they were owned
| by a media conglomerate, the pressure is on to behave more like
| other media business under the same ownership. They could have
| diversified in terms of revenue if they were independent.
| awill wrote:
| but how do you explain AnandTech lasting so so long if the
| business model didn't work?
|
| I remember reading AnandTech >20 years ago. I think it failed
| now because they slowed down on releasing content. Over the
| last 2 years they've hardly published anything. They didn't
| even cover the latest iPhones (and when they did, it was months
| after release when no one cared anymore).
| ksec wrote:
| I blame this on Future PLC. Not only their Ad model is worst of
| all the tech site, the tech layout and software for the site
| and posting articles were bad and I remember Ian complained
| about it multiple times. They could have at least focus on
| their core competency which is in-depth articles and
| explanations.
|
| Instead we now live in the world of rumours site like WCCftech,
| and Apple dominance in Tech circle since the iPhone means a lot
| of new ( relatively speaking ) tech readers are reading
| Macrumors and 9to5Mac as their tech new sources. Reporting
| things that those reporter dont understand and keep making fake
| rumours that makes absolutely no sense.
| mulderc wrote:
| I feel like something is very wrong when a publication the
| quality of AnandTech can't figure out a viable business model.
| j45 wrote:
| Very true. As much as we try to hope organizations might
| reinvent themselves or disrupt themselves for the future before
| something else does, they just provide a good service.
|
| I can't wonder if AnandTech had a substack angle it might have
| provided an option?
|
| Good, useful writing that teaches you how to look at,
| understand, use, or do something is invaluable. Creating
| beginners is everything in this world so they can progress.
| rglullis wrote:
| For anyone here working or in contact with the people at Future:
| the post mentions that the forums are still going to be open, but
| will there be any active work on it?
|
| I keep thinking that these specialized forums that lost space to
| Reddit could be revived if were integrated with ActivityPub.
| a1o wrote:
| Good opportunity to make the best of the forums. I would prefer
| traditional forums for community building over anything else.
| hengheng wrote:
| Gamers Nexus on YouTube appears to be carrying the torch of
| obsessively in-depth coverage. Ian Cutress has been doing his
| thing as well, but erred mostly on the side of being a
| philosopher rather than an investigator. Interested to see where
| all the people end up. Clearly the demand for good info hasn't
| vanished.
| Thaxll wrote:
| Gamers Nexus is not very technical though, they probably don't
| understand how a CPU works.
| rstat1 wrote:
| Guess you've never watched one of their failure analysis
| videos then, or really any of them if that's your comment.
| diggan wrote:
| > Gamers Nexus on YouTube appears to be carrying the torch of
| obsessively in-depth coverage.
|
| Although via videos rather than articles, sadly.
|
| It's sad how much information is moving to a much slower and
| data-intensive medium. The same is happening in lots of other
| areas as well, like game development. Articles always been
| easier for me to consume, but more and more valuable
| information is moving into videos these days that it's hard to
| avoid even though I prefer other mediums...
| vmladenov wrote:
| They do post their video scripts as articles with the
| relevant screenshots. It's not quite the same as a text-first
| article, but I prefer reading.
| RDaneel0livaw wrote:
| Completely agree. I am listening to some chill music and
| wanting to catch up on some hardware reviews, so I want to
| read a nice article. If I accidentally click on something
| that takes me to a god awful yt video, it completely disrupts
| my focus and irritates the hell out me. I instantly close the
| tab and never go back to whatever source pointed me there. I
| absolutely loathe yt video content of stuff that should
| obviously be text but isn't. Gaming content has gone this way
| a lot sadly.
| jsheard wrote:
| > Although via videos rather than articles, sadly.
|
| I recall them talking about how they prefer writing articles,
| especially given how info-dumpy their content tends to be,
| but videos are what actually pays the bills.
| MostlyStable wrote:
| I wonder if there will come a point when AI
| transcription/summarization gets good enough that, for any
| channel that cares, they can continue making their videos
| to pay the bills and also, for a trivial cost, publish
| associated articles for the people who prefer it. Given the
| assumption that not enough people will read articles to pay
| the bills, this shouldn't detract from their view
| count/income too much, and will provide a dramatically
| better experience for those who care.
|
| And if the channels themselves won't do it, I wonder when
| it will be possible for the user to do it.
|
| It seems like this is probably something that is already
| possible in a "good enough usually, even if not perfect"
| sense. I can imagine not too far in the future that a
| version of this could even embed clips/screenshots from the
| video for any portions where seeing how it is done is a
| useful addition to the text.
| walthamstow wrote:
| Nobody pays for words, but YouTube pays for videos. Sad but
| true.
| shantara wrote:
| http://gamersnexus.net/
| kevstev wrote:
| This reminds me of how shocked I was when memes using image
| macros started becoming a thing around 2008 or so. I still
| remembered the bad old days of dial up and waiting tens of
| seconds for images to load and thought it was so horridly
| inefficient to convey a message that way.
|
| Now we have HD videos pushing the same (and arguably worse)
| content taking tens if not hundreds of MBs and conveying the
| same information that is much harder to parse than a text
| file could do in a few kilobytes.
|
| I feel like I am having my old man yells at cloud moment
| here, but its a hugely inferior medium.
| Numerlor wrote:
| I feel like the "Cable TV-ification" applies to them, some of
| the videos are very much sensationalism. The host also comes
| off as a bit too full of themselves
| SirFatty wrote:
| early days, it was a great site and a valuable resource. It
| became less so over the years to the point I forgot about it.
| Kind of like Tom's Hardware.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| It ran great articles to the very end but it also had some
| series that were real stinkers.
|
| The one that bugged me was the monthly roundup of HDDs where,
| usually, they recommended that you pay $100 extra to get an
| expensive consumer HDD that, according to the spec sheet, was
| 3db quieter and consumed maybe 0.5W less than an inexpensive
| enterprise HDD (funny reversal, but the enterprise product is a
| mass-produced product they sell a lot of and all the hyper-thin
| SKUs aimed at consumers probably sold one here and one there)
| although anything is one bad bearing away from being 20db
| louder.
|
| This went in for years but they never confronted the issue
| directly by taking measurements or asking if the HDD industry
| was destroying itself by offering too many SKUs -- if WD had
| just one SKU _maybe_ Best Buy would stock it, but if there is a
| different one for a 2 bay NAS, a 3 bay NAS, a 4 bay NAS, and
| for recording video they won't stock any of them. (And with all
| those spurious choices they didn't give you a clear choice of
| CMR vs SMR!)
|
| Charlie Demerjian stands almost alone as a tech journalist who
| doesn't get high on the industry's supply and, on that level,
| Anandtech was another tech outlet dependent on that industry
| that couldn't give it the tough love to point out rampant brand
| destruction. Charlie told you 5 years ago that Intel's product
| roadmap was a suicide note, Anandtech sure didn't.
| erincandescent wrote:
| SemiAccurate has always been true to its name: occasional
| scoops but mixed with a lot of hyperbole, bluster, half
| truths and things that are just flat out wrong.
|
| Back when I worked at a semiconductor company, reading any
| articles about us was always very funny because it always had
| more things wrong than right.
| dageshi wrote:
| Those who wish the web to return to its hobbyist roots where
| nobody gets paid to write content online any more are starting to
| get their wish.
| rchaud wrote:
| That wish didn't involve a world where search engines were
| intentionally tweaking their algos to serve up low-effort
| blogspam with zero individuality, burying actual hobbyist
| websites.
| dageshi wrote:
| The impression I've got from said people here on HN is that
| search engines are disgusting ad powered horrors and
| therefore they're not needed either.
|
| How anyone finds anything I don't know but I guess we'll find
| out!
| walterbell wrote:
| _> now, more than ever, it's necessary to counter sensationalism
| and cynicism with high-quality reporting and testing that is used
| to support thoughtful conclusions. To quote Anand: "I don 't
| believe the web needs to be academic reporting or sensationalist
| garbage - as long as there's a balance, I'm happy."_
|
| A postscript deep dive article for AnandTech could look at the
| audience and business metrics of an ad-funded tech review site in
| 2024, in the context of competition from substack,
| Discord/Patreon, YouTube, neo-cable-tv, and other channels.
|
| Does Algolia have enough data for a graph of AnandTech article
| discussions on HN, e.g. submissions and comments?
| iamgopal wrote:
| I bought my first AMD Processor after reading review of it on
| their website in 2002.
| SmellTheGlove wrote:
| Wow. What a run, though. This is a hard business. I know, I ran a
| similar thing that was ever so briefly popular in the late 90s. I
| kept at it for a couple of years and maybe had a couple of
| reviews and articles get significant traffic over that span. I
| let it drop when I graduated high school - college was definitely
| the better bet for me haha. Back then I wished I could do it as
| well as Anand did. And they did it for almost 3 decades. If any
| of you happen to see this, I'm sad to see AnandTech end, but what
| you started had an amazing almost 3 decade run and you should be
| proud. I'm proud of you - AT is the best.
| NKosmatos wrote:
| Sad to read this, AnandTech has been one of the good and
| respectable sites all these decades. Old-timers (like myself)
| will for sure miss their reviews. So Long, and Thanks for All the
| Fish.
| huxley wrote:
| For me, Anandtech often scratched the itch that once upon a time
| was satisfied by Byte, 2600, and some of the trade magazines. Sad
| day.
| tyingq wrote:
| The comments about _" AnandTech's rebuke of sensationalism, link
| baiting, and the path to shallow 10-o'clock-news reporting"_ are
| interesting.
|
| Sounds like it difficult to make enough to survive unless you're
| doing these things.
|
| Which I suspect ties back to things like Google (and others)
| neglecting the quality of organic search, pushing it down the
| page, etc. Or competing with quality content by exposing it in
| snippets and AI summaries with only subtle ways to get to the
| actual article.
|
| I suppose, if that's the case, those practices eventually eat
| their own tail. No new Anandtech content to ignore or copy now,
| for example.
| imp0cat wrote:
| > Sounds like it difficult to make enough to survive unless
| you're doing these things.
|
| Yup. However, I can't find a confirmation anywhere in TFA. Just
| some hints here and there. So I wonder, what finally made them
| quit?
| wolpoli wrote:
| It sounds like Future Brand, the owner of both AnandTech and
| Tom's Hardware wanted to consolidate.
| VHRanger wrote:
| > Sounds like it difficult to make enough to survive unless
| you're doing these things.
|
| If you're on an advertising model, yes, impossible even.
|
| If you're on a patronage/subscription model, totally doable
| nowadays.
| elephanlemon wrote:
| Very sad, but Anandtech has been on a downslope since Anand left.
| Once that happened it seemed like they almost instantly went from
| publishing many times a week to only occasionally pushing out
| content, usually quite delayed. The quality was still very good
| though and I always tried to find an Anandtech review of whatever
| it was I was looking for. Did the publishers just cheap out and
| stop paying for enough articles? Or did people lose motivation
| when they found themselves working for a faceless corp instead of
| Anand?
| instj3 wrote:
| Yeah, I also noted that. In 2014 Anandtech was acquired by the
| same company that ran Tomshardware, the two sites were among
| the most popular in their segment. I never shook off the
| feeling that after the acquisition it was left to die.
| laweijfmvo wrote:
| Agree, but when Ian left a few years ago is when I ultimately
| stopped visiting all together.
|
| Maybe unavoidable, but the level of ads covering the website
| also made it borderline unreadable...
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| What ads? Seriously, though, when Anand and Ian left was
| about the time the content started losing quality, the ads
| started increasing, and I removed the site from my
| adblocker's whitelist.
| eitally wrote:
| I don't blame the site for this, though. Anand got out at about
| the same time as marketing overtook technological improvement
| in product development (for the most part). I remember the very
| early days (I lived just a couple miles from Anand in the
| Raleigh area) where he was doing super in-depth assessments at
| the board & chip level, through the rapidly changing evolution
| of motherboards, CPUs & GPUs in the early 2000s ... but as
| everything basically became mostly commoditized and user
| experience differences have reduced even for home-built PCs
| (and the number of people still home-building PCs, period!),
| there just hasn't been a compelling reason to continue this
| depth of analysis or writing for the past decade or so.
| amyjess wrote:
| > marketing overtook technological improvement in product
| development
|
| I would say another key change is things just becoming less
| modular over time.
|
| Like, the chipset used to be a major factor in choosing your
| motherboard, but it just doesn't matter anymore. Third-party
| chipsets are no longer a thing, and there's little difference
| between first-party chipsets anymore because every CPU has a
| full integrated northbridge now.
|
| And honestly, today's PCs are powerful enough that there's no
| point in even bothering to make optimal choices. You could
| pick mediocre parts for all your stuff and still end up with
| a beast. It's not like the P4 or Athlon XP days where you'd
| feel it if you picked a bleh motherboard or something.
| Strom wrote:
| > _usually quite delayed._
|
| I used to be a regular reader of AnandTech since the early
| 2000s and the delays are what drove me off the site.
| Specifically when the Nvidia GTX 1080 launched on May 27, 2016.
| The AnandTech review came out 2 months later on July 20, 2016.
| [1] I had no problem waiting a whole week, but after that it
| was getting ridiculous. They just didn't serve their readers.
|
| After I found replacement reviewers, mostly on YouTube, for my
| in depth reviews, I never went back to regularly visiting
| AnandTech. Their time had already passed in 2016 as far as I'm
| concerned. Not only were they delayed, but their reviews
| weren't even the most in depth any more.
|
| --
|
| [1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/10325/the-nvidia-geforce-
| gtx-...
| qwertox wrote:
| HN might as well put up a black ribbon for this news.
| wslh wrote:
| I felt a deep sadness after reading just the first paragraph, and
| I had to stop there for a while. It's very powerful. If you run
| your own business(es), you know how challenging it is. The
| stories of unicorns (epsilons) are rare and almost insignificant
| compared to the reality faced by most businesses.
| m4r1k wrote:
| It's shocking to realize I've been reading AnandTech's insightful
| and profound analysis for over two decades. The tech landscape
| has undergone a dramatic transformation in that time, yet
| AnandTech remained a steadfast and reliable source of
| information. They inspired countless hardware enthusiasts and
| reviewers, myself included, with many of us pursuing performance
| analysis as a career path. Their absence will be deeply felt, and
| it's truly a sad day for the tech community.
| causality0 wrote:
| Jesus I had no idea Anandtech was in trouble. Did they ever say
| anything about it? I would've signed up for a Patreon to keep
| them afloat.
| robin_reala wrote:
| They've been gradually dropping in quantity (though not
| quality) for a decade. The writing's been on the wall for a
| long time.
| user_7832 wrote:
| Yeah I don't think they ever mentioned anything before this. I
| suspect this was a slow decline over several years and many
| meetings where they realized they'd either have to "sell out"
| or shut doors - if it were a new sudden thing they probably
| would've asked for help or indicated a willingness to try and
| stay afloat. I can't really blame them.
| dartharva wrote:
| > In-depth reporting isn't always as sexy or as exciting as other
| avenues, but now, more than ever, it's necessary to counter
| sensationalism and cynicism with high-quality reporting and
| testing that is used to support thoughtful conclusions.
|
| Very true. But, in-depth reporting doesn't have to be not-sexy
| either. Considering the marked drop in audience attention spans
| in today's world along with the emergence of AI-driven knowledge
| sources, journalists will benefit a lot from just improving their
| presentation from long-form writing to something analogous to
| presentation slides with understandable visualizations.
| maxbond wrote:
| > And while the AnandTech staff is riding off into the sunset, I
| am happy to report that the site itself won't be going anywhere
| for a while. Our publisher, Future PLC, will be keeping the
| AnandTech website and its many articles live indefinitely.
|
| This is often not how these things go, and Future PLC deserves
| credit for good citizenship.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| I agree. Archivists shouldn't hold their breath, anyway.
| Lammy wrote:
| I am already mirroring the entire site lol
| maxbond wrote:
| Prudent!
| rchaud wrote:
| Thanks to an in-depth Anandtech review way back in 2011, I
| purchased a super cheap Dell Vostro laptop with a staggering 8
| hours of battery life, pretty much unheard of for Windows laptops
| at the time. Plenty of OEMs would straight up lie, but AT's
| battery tests provided the proof consumers needed.
|
| It's sad to see the state of 'tech journalism' in the Youtube age
| when it comes to hardware products. I feel like I'm watching a
| 20-minute lifestyle commercial rather than an actual nuts-and-
| bolts review. I guess that's what gets views and affiliate link
| revenue now.
| breck wrote:
| Wait what is happening?
|
| I'd like to bring AnandTech content to the public domain. Put it
| on the world wide scroll.
|
| Let me know if I can help breck7@gmail.com
| deweller wrote:
| From the article:
|
| > Our publisher, Future PLC, will be keeping the AnandTech
| website and its many articles live indefinitely. So that all of
| the content we've created over the years remains accessible and
| citable.
| jl6 wrote:
| A very sad, but not unexpected, end to another important source
| of quality journalism. Outcompeted, no doubt, by the noise &
| churn of the attention economy.
|
| I hope they open source their benchmarking procedures. It's
| valuable to see the results of comparable testing across multiple
| generations of hardware.
| keiferski wrote:
| I am not super familiar with AnandTech, but I question the idea
| that "tech journalism" is dead or dying. Marques Brownlee has
| almost 20 million subscribers on YouTube. Consumer Reports has 6
| million members. Etc.
|
| The difference, I think, is that media is shifting to video as
| the default, for better or worse. Looking at their YouTube
| channel, AnandTech only has about 20,000 subscribers, which looks
| like they never quite figured out how to transfer their content
| into video format.
| layer8 wrote:
| For worse.
|
| The main reason for tech journalism being more sustainable on
| YouTube is non-skippable ads and the recommendation algorithm.
| keiferski wrote:
| I'm more optimistic. Video may be clunky and largely
| difficult to search within now, but in the near future, with
| AI transcription and some kind of new UI, will become as easy
| to access as text is today.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Unlike a random blog, I can pay YouTube to remove all the
| ads. I watch GN videos, and they get paid, but I never see
| ads other than GN's sponsor message and merch which are
| trivial to skip.
|
| Compare AnandTech which has always been a user-hostile visual
| insult. The whole article is covered in ads. You can barely
| find the words. The articles are needlessly split over 25
| pages so you click and load over and over. They really
| pioneered a lot of bad patterns.
| layer8 wrote:
| > I can pay YouTube to remove all the ads
|
| Yes, and I do that myself, but most people don't, and the
| overall model wouldn't work without the ads.
| NoxiousPluK wrote:
| I agree, but so does the article; I quote: "Still, few things
| last forever, and the market for _written_ tech journalism is
| not what it once was - nor will it ever be again. "
| tmhrtly wrote:
| The article hints at this, with the following sentence: "Still,
| few things last forever, and the market for written tech
| journalism is not what it once was - nor will it ever be again"
| (emphasis on the written).
| keiferski wrote:
| Yeah, it's just weird to me that this entity with a big
| following and storied history isn't willing to adapt to the
| times, or even get a little creative and figure out how to do
| longform video combined with longform text.
| steve-rambo-fan wrote:
| Video was a mistake. Even high quality YouTube tech channels
| (like GamersNexus) work far better in a text format where you
| can compare benchmark results without running the video in mpv,
| taking dozens of screenshots, and then painstakingly comparing
| them. And that channel has a charismatic anchor, unlike many.
|
| At least they have a website with the same material.
|
| Have a look at rtings and try to come up with an idea how to
| make this work in a video format:
|
| https://www.rtings.com/headphones/reviews/sony/wh-1000xm4-wi...
|
| https://www.rtings.com/mouse/reviews/logitech/g305-lightspee...
|
| without losing 90% of information and getting shitty jokes
| instead.
| keiferski wrote:
| It doesn't really matter if it "was a mistake," because it's
| what the market is asking for. Cars were probably a mistake
| ecologically, vs. horses, but it's what we've got.
| steve-rambo-fan wrote:
| Sure, but the least we can do is support the few sane
| places that still remain, like rtings. Lest they follow the
| way of AnandTech and we're forced to scroll through hours
| of video to get the same information contained in a ten-
| minute text article, with interactive charts and comparison
| tools.
| keiferski wrote:
| I agree, but unfortunately that support doesn't seem to
| be widespread enough to sustain these kinds of things.
|
| At this point, I think efforts would be better placed in
| making a method that enables videos to be viewed in a way
| akin to text. AI transcription tools are getting there,
| so I think it might just be a matter of time.
| emn13 wrote:
| Was the market asking for tech review videos, or was the
| market asking for a platform that helps select, curate, and
| present content?
|
| If this trend were merely about format, then websites that
| just host videos would be a viable model - they're not
| really. I think this is more about the power of platforms
| than of the format.
|
| I'm sure the format _also_ helps, given how donation-
| dependent small-scale publishers are which works best if
| publishers are humanized, but I'd guess the more impactful
| matter is the way platforms can keep consumers onboard and
| help them discover new publishers than the format.
| keiferski wrote:
| My experience is that for 95% of people under the age of
| 30, their media consumption is almost entirely video.
| That's simply the _way it is_ , fortunately or
| unfortunately. And these tech review YouTube channels
| seems to do quite well for themselves, dramatically
| better than the equivalent text-only sites.
| mezzie2 wrote:
| A large portion of people are genuinely or functionally
| illiterate. Like we're supposed to pitch general material
| at ~ a 5th or 6th grade reading level because that's the
| _average_. Half of people can 't even do that. I have
| daily encounters with adults who work corporate jobs/own
| businesses who can't interpret compound sentences. I
| can't use conjunctions or sentences with multiple
| clauses, etc.
|
| This is going to get worse: the elementary and middle
| school teachers/education professionals have been
| screaming at us that there's a major issue with reading
| in the upcoming generation due to a change in how many
| schools taught reading for several years that turned out
| to be a _horrible_ idea. Add the pandemic on top of it
| (because losing a year of learning is a big deal at the
| elementary school level), and now we have a generation
| who can 't read.
|
| I think we're going back to having a literate class and a
| non-literate class, honestly. I can't see us putting in
| the time, money, and effort to fix the situation. Instead
| we'll just change formats (and probably have a bunch of
| middle men pop up that turn text into video with AI for
| the illiterate).
|
| We're never going to see general purpose text again as a
| culture. Text will only be primary in certain audiences.
| (Lawyers, software people, librarians, etc.)
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Maybe rebuses will come back in a big way.
|
| OT: you are the same mezzie as mezzie was?
| mezzie2 wrote:
| I am!
|
| I chop my accounts every once in a while so I don't get
| too attached to them/so my karma doesn't influence how
| people receive my ideas.
|
| I also take breaks for a few months from each social site
| fairly regularly to ensure that they're not slowly
| boiling my brain into brain rot.
| vundercind wrote:
| Can confirm, English teacher friends report that reading
| ability is dropping with each year and is now so bad
| they're concerned about the survival of literate society,
| period. "Advanced" kids struggle with books that were
| considered normal for their age in the 80s or 90s.
| Compound sentences are exactly part of the problem these
| teachers have highlighted--the kids can't keep enough
| context in their heads to track what's going on through
| multiple clauses, even the simple sort that were common
| in writing for kids within the last 50 years.
| mezzie2 wrote:
| Right, it's a perfect storm.
|
| And I really do think we'll just give up on the idea of
| literacy being required in society as that generation
| grows up. Fixing it would be too much work and cost too
| much money/time, and would be incompatible with current
| American social values. I also genuinely do think a lot
| of Boomers and Gen X have mild lead poisoning, so our
| elders are probably also going to struggle more the older
| they get. (Who knows, maybe the microplastics are also
| eating the contextual reasoning parts of our brains and
| we'll have the same problem.) So if 80% of society isn't
| functionally literate, functional literacy will go away
| as an information requirement for the average citizen.
|
| I wouldn't be shocked if literacy becomes a college level
| skill that's only taught until students stop having to
| consult sources/teaching materials from before the
| 2010s/2020s. There will be a few exceptions, like the
| historians, but eventually literacy is going to be seen
| as an eccentric skill that used to be a sign of culture
| but is no longer relevant. (As an example, my basic
| knowledge of Latin would be very impressive in a lot of
| historical periods but in 2024 America it's just a weird
| personal quirk.)
| autoexec wrote:
| > also genuinely do think a lot of Boomers and Gen X have
| mild lead poisoning
|
| So do countless children and adults today. It's in a lot
| of people's water.
| mezzie2 wrote:
| Fair point.
|
| I used to live in Flint. Maybe that's why I didn't
| remember to mention it...
| autoexec wrote:
| It's happening all over the country. https://www.nrdc.org
| /sites/default/files/styles/medium_100/p...
|
| I have some family in Chicago who haven't been able to
| drink their tap water for _years_. The city will get
| around to replacing the pipes eventually, but it 's a
| mess. (https://www.chicagotribune.com/2024/05/27/chicago-
| lead-pipes...)
| keiferski wrote:
| Well, one trend that seems to be going in the opposite
| direction is how many videos / shorts now have subtitles
| and text by default. So that will still presumably have
| an effect on literacy.
|
| Even then, I think readers overestimate the amount of
| people that are/were actually reading serious literature.
| Even when literacy and books were at their peaks, most
| people were reading pulp novels and other low-end books.
|
| So while I don't really disagree with you per se, I do
| think it's unnecessarily pessimistic, and it's a better
| approach to try and approach this new media format with
| fresh eyes and optimism.
| mezzie2 wrote:
| I like how much more prevalent subtitles are now, but I
| don't think that most people are going to read them.
| People are astoundingly good at ignoring things they've
| decided are irrelevant.
|
| > Even then, I think readers overestimate the amount of
| people that are/were actually reading serious literature.
| Even when literacy and books were at their peaks, most
| people were reading pulp novels and other low-end books.
|
| Oh, absolutely. People into 'serious' literature have
| always been a minority and definitely never close to the
| average person's experience with the written word. I
| think what we're seeing is more that less literacy is
| needed to be _functional_ in society. The average PMC
| /middle class person in the 1970s needed a higher rate of
| literacy than they do in 2024 because video used to be a
| lot more expensive to create and disseminate: I work in
| corporate training and the videos we create now would
| have been handbooks or factsheets in the 70s/80s. For
| domain specific or technical knowledge, the written word
| was basically the only option for several decades (aside
| from like...audio tapes, which have their own issues).
| Housewives used to have to grab different flyers from
| grocery stores and price compare, everyone had to be able
| to read maps (with no spoken directions), mechanics had
| to consult the Giant Car Books, etc. This did present a
| lot of problems for people who didn't or couldn't reach
| that level of literacy for whatever reason, and I'm glad
| those people (e.g. those with dyslexia, those who were
| forced to read in a language they didn't know well, etc.)
| have better options now.
|
| > So while I don't really disagree with you per se, I do
| think it's unnecessarily pessimistic, and it's a better
| approach to try and approach this new media format with
| fresh eyes and optimism.
|
| I'm neutral on the shift from a societal perspective. My
| main point of judgement is more 'our changes are
| happening because we lack the political will to address
| issues' rather than the changes themselves. For example,
| if we want to commit to video being the default form, we
| should have video literacy classes in the same way we did
| written literacy: People should know basic video creation
| techniques, be able to determine what makes a video
| more/less trustworthy, how to effectively navigate
| through a video, how to use videos as reference pieces,
| etc. I'm displeased because the post-literate world is
| coming about due to a failure of education and governance
| rather than due to the positives of video. But
| objectively, the shift from the written word to video
| isn't any worse than the shift from oral tradition to the
| written word. It also makes sense since humans learn by
| imitation and are very visual animals.
|
| I'm _personally_ pessimistic, but that 's because I'm
| visually impaired, so everything being primarily focused
| on inalterable visuals is a loss for me (whereas an
| article I can make big text/zoom/print/whatever for
| accessibility purposes), but I've also been sad about
| that since Instagram started and made everything about
| pictures. Video is an improvement there: At least I can
| follow videos by sound.
| walthamstow wrote:
| I don't agree that the market (consumers) are asking for
| video, they just refuse to pay for words, while Google (not
| the consumer) will pay for videos.
| keiferski wrote:
| Video is increasingly becoming the dominant way people
| use the internet:
|
| _As of 2023, roughly 65% of all internet traffic came
| from video sites,[4] up from 51% in 2016._
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_traffic
| ndiddy wrote:
| Horses caused a huge pollution problem in urban areas. By
| the 1890s, New York City had over 100,000 horses, which
| produced over 2.5 million pounds of manure per day. The
| streets were covered with manure and dead horse carcuses.
| Cars were seen as the far cleaner alternative.
| Lammy wrote:
| > it's what the market is asking for
|
| Facebook, for example, famously misrepresented market
| demand for video. Video is what _advertisers_ were asking
| for: https://slate.com/technology/2018/10/facebook-online-
| video-p...
| myworkinisgood wrote:
| I don't think Marques is a tech journalist. He is a consumer
| goods journalist.You wouldn't see videos about architecture of
| Zen processor and their impact from Marques. Not a criticism,
| different fields.
| tempest_ wrote:
| I would describe him as a tech enthusiast.
|
| His content doesn't have the journalistic quality that feels
| like he is going out and digging for stories etc. The content
| is given to him by companies and he chooses to showcase what
| he is given.
|
| There is not really anything wrong with that either but I
| don't expect any real scoops to come from his channel.
| ksec wrote:
| >I am not super familiar with AnandTech
|
| >Marques Brownlee ( MKBHD )
|
| I think comparing Anandtech to MKBHD is quite offensive. There
| is at least _multiple_ order of magnitude difference.
| INTPenis wrote:
| In a hostile landscape it seems that the good ones shutdown, and
| the indifferent ones sell out.
| K33P4D wrote:
| I remember reading their review for the Core 2 Duo E7500, which
| was my first foray into PCMR back in 2009 along with a GTX 260.
| FSB multipliers were fun!
|
| Quite sad, we lost two of the greatest tech journalism of
| yesteryears, Game Informer and now Anandtech. Maximum PC barely
| hung on and later were boughtout by PCgamer.
|
| I doubt anything will replace the in-depth tech journalism of
| Anandtech without visible paid biases and manipulation by big
| tech. I think Video centric media tech houses will rule the roost
| like Linus Media, GamerNexus and HuB.
|
| Hoping Igors lab, chips&cheese and der8auer to carry the baton
| forward. I will kiss an old LGA 775 processor in their honor,
| rest in circuits.
| awill wrote:
| I will really miss this site. They did incredible deep reviews of
| tech.
|
| But once Anand left, the site started dying. They posted 1 review
| a month, and didn't even cover the iphone or galaxy or pixel
| launches. How on earth was that meant to survive?
| xnx wrote:
| Some macro-trends that must have contributed:
|
| * Rise of social media
|
| * Popularity of short-form video
|
| * Significant deceleration in single-core performance gains
|
| * Focus on fashion (e.g. colored LEDs) over performance in
| computers
|
| * Popularity of smartphones/consoles
| esafak wrote:
| I assume it is because DIY PCs plateaued two decades ago. Now
| it's all Macs, mobiles, and consoles.
| xnx wrote:
| Agree. The most significant improvement in a long time has
| been has been SSDs. Was cool to have lived through a period
| where compute power was delivering real-world 2x performance
| every 18 months.
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| >Focus on fashion
|
| People have been tricking out their rigs with fancy lighting
| since the beginning, it's not a new development.
| xnx wrote:
| Definitely not new, but a lot more prevalent now. Photos from
| early 2000s LAN parties are dominated by beige boxes.
| zelos wrote:
| Exactly: it was a lot less common to customise your case
| when it required a drill and a Dremel saw.
| endisneigh wrote:
| Unsurprising - people don't pay, and their audience is perhaps a
| bit more likely to use Adblock, not to mention the decline in
| news in general.
| ryukoposting wrote:
| Anandtech is how I learned what Ubuntu is. I must have been about
| 10 years old, and the concept of any OS besides Windows or MacOS
| was completely foreign to me. Within a few weeks, I had dug an
| old laptop out of my dad's bin of "stuff work wasn't using
| anymore" and I managed to put Ubuntu on it. I think it was an HP.
| I don't remember the exact specs but I _do_ remember that the GPU
| was failing, there were weird video glitches all the time, and
| the battery held a charge for about 15 minutes.
|
| That was my first experience with Linux. That broken-ass computer
| was what I used when I learned Arduino. I'm now a firmware
| engineer, writing this comment on my work laptop, which is
| running Ubuntu.
| whatever1 wrote:
| Still the GPU barely works
| ForOldHack wrote:
| That is not MY Fault.
| asadm wrote:
| PR welcome
| cseleborg wrote:
| There's an excellent podcast called Acquired with a 3-part
| episode covering the birth and evolution of NVIDIA, highly
| recommended.
| vergessenmir wrote:
| Makes me feel old. I was at uni when Ubuntu came out. But my
| story was similar to yours in the mid 90s and I got hold of a
| walnut creek cd with Slackware from some PC mag, a couple
| floppy disks and discarded hardware and I was off to the races
|
| There was something about discovering tech through dedicated
| tech sites back then that felt exciting.
|
| Now, any time I find something new it always has a polished
| marketed feel to it and has none of the secretive clandestine
| undiscovered power that old tech had.
|
| I guess I am getting old
| cseleborg wrote:
| Slackware!!! Dang, I had forgotten that name. That was the
| first distro I installed as well. Xeyes and stuff. Oh,
| dear...
| 0898 wrote:
| The guy got sick with a mystery illness didn't he? This was
| about 20 years ago. He blogged about the saga of having
| doctors try to figure out what was wrong with him, and I
| think was self-administering various treatments. Must look
| up how he's doing.
| com wrote:
| He seems to have made a significantly good recovery.
| nharada wrote:
| Yeah dang my first linux install was at about the same age
| but it was Red Hat (not RHEL or Fedora). I remember most of
| my time was spent trying to get my network drivers working
| properly.
| voidmain0001 wrote:
| I got hooked with Yggdrasil on CD-RROM. The 20+ 3.5" floppies
| was too bulky for me.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yggdrasil_Linux/GNU/X
| bosky101 wrote:
| Maybe a potential acquirer could start a video team to catchup
| with modern times.
| Havoc wrote:
| First time I'm actually seeing a picture of Anand! Always figured
| there is probably some young guy named that behind it but never
| put a face to it
| pts_ wrote:
| Dang silly videos took down written journalism. Readers are
| mourning.
| Brett_Riverboat wrote:
| One of the few tech outlets that I find to be trustworthy, it's
| sad to see them go.
| scrlk wrote:
| I'm sad to hear that they're shutting down. I thought that
| Anandtech would be one of the holdouts for written tech
| journalism in a world that's become increasingly video first.
|
| What are people reading these days for hardware reviews?
|
| I find that Notebookcheck and GSMArena are decent for laptop and
| phone reviews respectively.
| getlawgdon wrote:
| Can't believe it! Thank you, Anadtech, for all the great stuff
| over the years.
| openrisk wrote:
| > the market for written tech journalism is not what it once was
| - nor will it ever be again
|
| This is very darkly ominous and of course it does not apply just
| to tech journalism.
|
| Written communication, by real people, is not an optional luxury,
| its the best means to exchange dense, valuable, high quality
| information.
|
| It feels as if the current digital "economy" is hell-bent to turn
| society into an illiterate, short-video watching, ad-clicking
| mob.
|
| Not sure there has ever been technological innovation that was so
| regressive in its impact, profiting by actively degrading the
| human condition. Alas, here we are and we can't blame the
| Martians.
| knodi123 wrote:
| Compare broadcast television's first days with what it is now.
| There are a lot of parallels.
| spacemadness wrote:
| It's not really a "current economy" thing or anything to do
| with technological innovation itself. As someone mentioned
| elsewhere, our economic model of line must go up quarterly
| forever is the real thing to fix here. Does turning society
| into an illiterate mob make sense long-term? Most would say no.
| Does it make sense short-term? Unfortunately it makes a lot of
| sense as long as you can get out with your cash hoard before
| everything burns. Companies are simply acting towards what we
| have been incentivizing for decades now.
| openrisk wrote:
| > you can get out with your cash hoard
|
| cash is effectively claims against what other people can give
| you in the future.
|
| An illiterate mob can only give you very few things of value.
| So, indeed, this is short-termism running society to the
| ground - as if there is no tomorrow.
| spacemadness wrote:
| This is why some of the rich are constructing elaborate
| bunkers just in case. So I guess there is some long-term
| strategizing after all.
| goodluckchuck wrote:
| I would push back some. Humans have communicated orally long
| before writing and lectures / interviews / discussions remain
| highly effective.
|
| After all, not everyone was in favor of the pulp that churned
| from mass-market printing presses.
|
| However, I can certainly imagine a voice-enabled LLM trained on
| European History that students could learn a lot from. People
| have been printing books for 500+ years, but we've really only
| gotten into user-generated video within the past 10 years.
|
| Throughout my childhood video was really quite time-consuming
| to produce. It largely still is. If we can continue get that
| friction down, then over time I expect we'll se more and more
| valuable video content being produced.
| Jun8 wrote:
| OTOH, although not tech journalism, but consider the Substack
| success of The Free Press and some others. There might be some
| light at the end of this tunnel.
| gigatexal wrote:
| Holy smokes. End of an era.
|
| I was around when the ghz wars were happening. I remember reading
| SharkyExtreme, hothardware, 2CPU.com, hardocp, anandtech and
| others for their reviews.
|
| Sad. Very sad. I almost wish they had not decided to close up
| shop. Instead spin out and go sub only.
| jdubs wrote:
| Peak PC.
| pixelpoet wrote:
| Don't forget the leading light for most of that time,
| TechReport. It absolutely breaks my heart to see what happened
| to that site...
| gigatexal wrote:
| Oh man! Techreport was amazing back in the day. Now it's
| unrecognizable.
| AlexDragusin wrote:
| > And while the AnandTech staff is riding off into the sunset, I
| am happy to report that the site itself won't be going anywhere
| for a while. Our publisher, Future PLC, will be keeping the
| AnandTech website and its many articles live indefinitely.
|
| THANK YOU!
| Lammy wrote:
| x Doubt
| will_lam wrote:
| Damn. End of an era. Anandtech was the reason I got into hardware
| and computers in general.
| nullsmack wrote:
| Absolutely gutted to see another long running website from the
| glory days of the Internet closing up shop.
| erickhill wrote:
| Anantech was _the_ high watermark in tech journalism and the only
| place I 'd go to look at in-depth (sometimes beyond belief)
| reviews of Apple hardware test results not found anywhere else on
| the web. Page after page after page of detailed tests and
| results.
|
| Hard to imagine that type of content being lucrative from a
| display-ad point of view if they used traditional ad networks,
| but the effort was absolutely appreciated and respected by
| readers.
|
| A sad day but considering how the online ad market has tried to
| force publishers to focus on video content an understandable one
| for printed-word journalists. It's awful.
| epolanski wrote:
| This is true, and I second your sadness. They always had those
| 1/2/3 pages more than competitors about architecture details at
| the start of every review.
|
| But apparently right now it pays more to do a cheap video
| review on YouTube with fake benchmarks, you get the hundred
| thousands video views, sell the hardware and call it a day.
| xyzzy4747 wrote:
| I guess it's too much work to write articles all the time?
| abixb wrote:
| Breaks my heart. Grew up reading AnandTech in the early 2010s for
| all things hardware -- processor releases, updates to the DDR
| SDRAM standard, motherboard and NAND flash reviews.
|
| The era of unbiased, objective and deeply technical journalism is
| dying out. Sad.
| mastax wrote:
| It's very sad but not unexpected. Hard to live off advertising
| when your demographics are prime adblock users. I did disable
| adblock on AnandTech when I remembered to, and gritted my teeth
| at how awful it was to have ads covering every square millimeter
| of free space.
| wejick wrote:
| There was time I read Tom's Hardware and thought that was the top
| of tech journalism and reviews,until the (i don't remember when)
| a revamp to the site that focused more on news. Then I found
| anandtech, reading all in depth article from the marketing
| material down to architecture level. It was very eye opening, the
| quality and depth is even on higher level. I was sad when Ian
| left, but now it's the ultimate sadness.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| Tom's Hardware took a nosedive when Thomas Pabst left.
|
| Selling it to have time with his kids (IIRC) was a fantastic
| choice, but I miss his version of it for sure.
| monkeydust wrote:
| Real Shame. Does make me think what kind of business model is
| needed for this type of publication to survive and thrive? There
| must be a way ... I would really hope. Would be very curious at
| to the conversations that happened at Future PLC prior to
| shutting this asset down. Couldn't find much on companies
| fillings.
| kevstev wrote:
| Yeah- I am personally struggling to understand how a website
| could be successful in 1997 run out of an apartment, but now
| that the PC and tech industry is many times bigger these sites
| can't make a go of it. And the headwinds Anand and Ars etc
| faced... I remember back in the 90s they wouldn't let them into
| Computex and CES.
|
| Interestingly it was just last week that I was looking into
| building a NAS (Synology is leaning in hard on enshitification
| lately) and its suprisingly feasible, and I was wondering why
| no one talks about motherboards anymore, only CPUs/GPUs, and
| occasionally disks (spinning rust or solid state)- I thought I
| might have just been mentally ignoring those articles, but they
| really don't exist anymore. Ars/Anand/Toms had reviews for
| models once every 6 months or so.
|
| Into the graveyard you go with, Aces Hardware, Sharky Extreme,
| Thresh's Firingsquad, and I am sure I am forgetting others that
| I used to load up every day but just don't exist anymore.
| Ekaros wrote:
| I wonder when text based media actually became unsustainable on
| Internet. And how publications somehow lasted until now, was
| there still someone funding them in hopes of them working out?
| Like whole timeframe when things went from somewhat sustainable
| to unsustainable.
| lvl155 wrote:
| Anandtech, Slashdot, etc. These are some of the best websites
| that I followed throughout my career. Slashdot is where I learned
| about bitcoin for example. Phoronix is another. Level1Tech
| replaced some of these for me but the long forms are harder to
| come by these days.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| I already kinda moved away from reading it after Anand moved to
| Apple. The quality and frequency seemed to drop and I lost
| interest.
| Ataraxic wrote:
| Just wanted to say that I remember joining the Anandtech forums
| in middle school in the early 2000's and was quite active for a
| number of years.
|
| Reading articles and discussions there was my first experience
| getting into tech and helped my build my first computer.
|
| I hope the editor and writers of Anandtech know the impact they
| had!
| pajeets wrote:
| For Anandtech to shut down means we are headed for a major
| recession.
| jmyeet wrote:
| Haven't all the good review article sites disappeared at this
| point? DPReview springs to mind.
|
| Anandtech was always reliable. It was Tom's Hardware when Tom's
| Hardware sold out (some 20 years ago). Many here may not even
| know that Tom's Hardware was originally a well-respected source
| of information. But I guess Tom's Hardware was a glimpse into the
| future, low-quality content litttered with affiliate-spam.
|
| But there is a market for high-quality content still. I can't
| help but think that the article sites simply failed to adapt.
| Look at Linus's Tech Tips [1]. Yes, video production is expensive
| but the advertising revenue is also higher.
|
| None of these sites seemed to have adapted to the world of short
| form video content (Tiktok, Youtube Shorts, IG Reels) in a way
| that feels fresh, organic and useful.
|
| Reddit seems to be the last bastion of getting authentic
| information and even that is steadily getting astroturfed.
|
| [1]: https://www.youtube.com/user/linustechtips
| instagraham wrote:
| A red flag needs to go up when Future PLC buys anything.
|
| We need a case to be made for enthusiast-owned media. Anything
| left to the corporates will eventually degrade and die.
|
| This is something I will work on, once I reach the stage of my
| life that involves capital. Things need to be _better_ for the
| niche reporting world.
| maxglute wrote:
| Did not think Anandtech would have lasted almost 30 years. Sad
| non the less. What's the oldest tech site still around now?
| ianbnet wrote:
| This is really tragic. I understand the pressures that Anandtech
| is under, and of course they've just been doing it for so long
| that I have to think Ryan and team are burnt out, but what a
| bummer! AFAIK Anandtech is unique at least in the English-
| language internet. It's going to leave a huge hole.
|
| I'm glad the forums continue and hope they thrive. Those forums
| are where I started my tech support journey 20+ years ago. It'll
| be interesting to see if Toms can fill in some of the more in-
| depth, technical and objective reporting.
| elvircrn wrote:
| Last week while looking into the Apple DMP exploit paper [1], I
| noticed that the researchers were inspired by this [2] anandtech
| article.
|
| Y'all will be missed.
|
| [1] https://www.prefetchers.info/ [2]
| https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-de...
| watersb wrote:
| How to say enough? Thank you thank you thank you
|
| CPU Microarchitecture analysis was the best, after Ars Technica
| cofounder Jon Stokes retired from his site: Anand and Brian Klug
| and Ian Cutress; I'm certain I've overlooked a few stellar tech
| analysts.
|
| Especially during the era when Intel was trying to wedge x86 into
| mobile and even wearable devices.
|
| Of late, the site has been posting the occasional deep-dive
| hardware review (notably, PC power supplies by E. Fylladitakis)
| and industry breaking news (Ganesh, Anton Shilov), but it's all
| moved to Tom's Hardware.
| foobarian wrote:
| sic transit gloria mundi
| agumonkey wrote:
| One of my main bookmarks when I got an internet connection. o7
| watersb wrote:
| Where to go now?
|
| Chips and Cheese https://chipsandcheese.com/
|
| Serve the Home https://www.servethehome.com/
|
| Tom's Hardware https://www.tomshardware.com/
| otterley wrote:
| No not Tom's Hardware. That site is basically UGC now and is
| hot garbage.
| hollerith wrote:
| UGC == user-generated content.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| I was going to say ArsTechinica which I have fond memories of
| from many years ago, but I just took a look and I don't even
| recognize it - looks more like engadget. So, no, not
| recommending.
| WoodenChair wrote:
| Any other sites folks would recommend? It doesn't look to me
| like the sites mentioned have the same mix of stories as Anand
| would have covered. I'd like something that's really in the
| same vein.
| LooseMarmoset wrote:
| So many good sites gone, or unrecognizable due to clickbait or
| outrage news. In particular:
|
| Anandtech Tech Report HardOCP Ars Technica (Eric Berger is the
| lone holdout here) Slashdot
|
| the list goes on. I'm glad at least that Anand went out as he
| went in. Thanks for all the years, Anand!
| josemanuel wrote:
| Felt like it went downhill once Ian Cutress left..
| blowsand wrote:
| Interesting, it was literally exactly 10 years ago Anand
| announced his exit.
|
| https://www.anandtech.com/show/8456/the-road-ahead
| tristor wrote:
| This is a very sad day. Along the way in my life and career I had
| a brief stint building custom computers for other people, and I
| spent quite a lot of time getting into overclocking for myself.
| Those journeys and my interest in computer hardware, performance,
| security, and how that impacted systems was heavily influenced by
| gaming and by the community that surrounded it. Most of the
| places I used to haunt are long gone, but through all that
| AnandTech was always around. It's the first place I go when I
| want to learn about a piece of hardware, and now it's gone.
|
| I am happy at least that there are others trying to carry the
| torch. Gamer's Nexus, Chips and Cheese, and a few small blogs
| here and there are still trying to dig into the nitty gritty of
| computer hardware in a way that's not only approachable, but
| accurate, without all the marketing BS. It's unfortunate though
| that it's so hard to make something like this survive.
| blowsand wrote:
| This may not be a popular opinion, but this news reminds me how
| much I miss the Block-era Engadget, and even the old Gizmodo.
| Both have woven politics in so deeply and the writing at times so
| clearly uninformed that they are not enjoyable.
| declan_roberts wrote:
| I was genuinely curious what type of politics a tech website
| like Gizmodo would get into. Then I saw they have a "politics"
| section, with 9 out of the 20 first articles with "Trump" in
| the headline. Now I understand.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| At this point I'm more surprised when someone _doesn't_ find
| a way to work politics into whatever they are saying. We are
| well past the point when a site needed to have some plausible
| connection to politics to justify including it.
|
| The number of random Kamala blow job innuendo comments I've
| seen posted in completely unrelated topics in the last few
| jobs is disheartening.
| arandomsapien wrote:
| I feel so nostalgic when these old places close up shop. I
| remember visiting AnandTech in the late 90s when I was still
| struggling to install Linux. Back when brick and mortar software
| stores were still a thing, staffed by like minded nerds who were
| happy to guide a young one and share knowledge.
|
| I can't think of many other sites that have been around this
| long. https://www.bluesnews.com/ for gaming news comes to mind.
| It's been going since 96.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| The Register. But it's also not a good as it used to be.
| Farfignoggen wrote:
| As far as Anandtech's published article history that has to be
| kept online or else so much Wikipedia content will lose the
| Anandtech article references that are used heavily there and in
| other places online!
|
| So the status of that content needs to be discussed and how that
| can be preserved!
| RGamma wrote:
| > we'll still have a place for everyone to talk about the latest
| in technology - and have those discussions last longer than 48
| hours.
|
| Good jab!
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| It will be missed.
|
| _> AnandTech's final boss_
|
| Quips like that, are one reason.
| locallost wrote:
| I think the underrated aspect of the downfall is just how much
| tech was for the lack of a better word commoditized. I used to be
| the target audience, but even I don't really care that much
| anymore about all the details -- my last PC was built over 10
| years ago, and when my laptop dies I will again buy a laptop that
| is the best combination of performance and hassle free. And the
| new generation that still cared never peeked beyond YouTube,
| which is definitely true.
|
| It's actually crazy how fast new media became old media.
| ghc wrote:
| This makes me incredibly sad. Nothing lasts forever, but AT has
| been a part of my life since it launched, when I was a teen
| obsessed with computers. I didn't feel so sad when Slashdot or
| The Inquirer declined, maybe because they were in decline over a
| long period. But AT was special, they only declined in review
| frequency, not quality.
| seatac76 wrote:
| Sad day but I guess Anand moving to Apple made this more
| plausible. I'm going to miss the meticulously perf charts. They
| do have some great talent, I hope they go on to do great tech
| journalism.
| spaceguillotine wrote:
| up next slashdot?
|
| feels like the old internet is nearly gone
| lxgr wrote:
| That's so sad. Farewell and thanks for everything!
|
| For me, the beginning of the end was when Anand and Brian Klug
| both moved to Apple. While I bet that they're doing great things
| there, I've been significantly less fascinated by new hardware,
| and in particular Apple hardware, ever since.
|
| Shiny exteriors and magical features might appeal to many, but to
| me, somebody explaining in all detail what makes it work doesn't
| take anything away from the magic - quite the opposite.
| emuneee wrote:
| This times 1000. I loved their deeply technical reviews and
| articles. I got hooked early on their CPU and GPU deep dives
| and their mobile deep dives in the 2010s.
|
| I've been reading them since before my teenage years and they
| got me interested in the insides of tech enough for me to
| pursue and gain my degree in Computer Engineering. It
| definitely changed when Anand and Brian left, but end of an era
| now that the site is shutting down.
| nntwozz wrote:
| What a strange take on Apple hardware.
|
| Apple is doing amazing things with Apple silicon.
| lxgr wrote:
| Of course they're doing great things, but my point is that
| they're trying hard to keep it a secret _how_ they 're doing
| them. Compare what Apple is revealing about their chips with
| what Intel used to present back when they were the market
| leader, for example.
|
| Anandtech was great at exploring these secrets and presenting
| their findings in a great way. That's what I miss.
| omnee wrote:
| Anandtech was one of my earliest sources of highly quality tech
| reporting. In particular their reliance on data and testing
| always stood out. Many hours were spent there during my formative
| years. And, while I did stop reading it regularly at University,
| it had already played an important part in informing, and so
| shaping me.
|
| Thanks, and farewell!
| system2 wrote:
| But the site gets millions of clicks per month. Why would they
| kill a google ads printing machine?
| jowdones wrote:
| A bit sad. But I haven't checked the site in 10+ years. It was
| hot in the heydays of the Internet and Pentium processors,
| reading reviews about CPU and motherboard performance really
| helped in deciding what to buy when a top of the line computer
| was already obsolete a year later.
|
| Progress has essentially halted since 15+ years. Back then a new
| computer really coud do something the old one didn't even dreamt
| of. Now what can the new generation of CPU do? Watch YouTube
| shorts even shorter? :) Or the new Android or Apple phone? Send
| more pictures on WhatsApp? Literally don't see any difference
| between my current phone / computer compared to what I had 10
| years ago. (I don't play games, maybe there it's visible
| somewhat).
|
| Anyhow, it was nice while it lasted but all good things must come
| to an end ... Bye Anandtech, you will be remembered.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| There is an alternative history where Google and FB et al. didn't
| eat up all the advertising revenue that used to sustain good
| journalism.
|
| It might be impossible to have independent journalism with the
| internet as it currently is.
|
| I don't know what the alternative is, but I do sometimes wonder
| what would have happened if search engines had been prevented
| from displaying search results from news organizations that
| happened within the last month. This might have trained internet
| folks to go to the news websites for news and kept the economics
| propped up a bit better than the disaster it currently is.
| bheadmaster wrote:
| > what would have happened if search engines had been prevented
| from displaying search results from news organizations that
| happened within the last month
|
| News sites would probably change whatever metadata Google is
| using to check site age to make their news articles appear one-
| day-more-than-month old to Google crawlers, all as a part of
| Search Engine Optimization techniques.
| grog454 wrote:
| There is a trivial solution to this. Store your own copy (or
| hash, or whatever) of the article and don't rank it until
| _your_ copy is at least a month old.
|
| The idea is still nonesense because some other search engine
| will show up without this restriction, and any news site
| would _prefer_ to be listed there, rather than not.
| Gimpei wrote:
| My guess is that this would be even worse for news sites as it
| would lower their overall traffic. Certainly seems to be the
| case in Canada. I don't get the sense that search
| engines/fb/etc are the problem. Rather it's 1) loss of
| classified ads and 2) competition from all the free content
| provided in blogs, posts, tweets and so on. Why pay to read an
| uninformed opinion piece when you can get it for free scrolling
| through your X feed?
| TylerE wrote:
| Absolutely. As someone who spent about 5 years working in
| local news a bit over a decade ago, it wasn't the search
| engines or Facebook that killed us, it was craigslist.
| Especially business classifieds, while not individually big
| $$$, they added up. We had some edge in content quality for a
| while, but the classifieds drying up led to deep cuts in the
| newsroom, and then there was nothing separating us from the
| local TV stations who also had superficial coverage, but got
| it out much quicker.
| zeroclicks wrote:
| Right. That's an interesting though exercise. We ended up with
| "dumbed down" summary news.
| hedora wrote:
| Display ads / Google create lots of problems, but news used to
| be mostly funded by classified ads (and print subscriptions).
|
| Craigslist basically killed that entire subindustry by giving
| the service away for free.
| vermaden wrote:
| I did not expected such a sad news this Friday ...
|
| AnandTech - one of THE sites that literally done hardware
| upbringing for me ... will be no more.
|
| Thank you for all the in depth reviews and explanation how
| hardware work - I use this knowledge to this day ...
|
| Farewell.
| rock_artist wrote:
| > Finally, I'd like to end this piece with a comment on the Cable
| TV-ification of the web. A core belief that Anand and I have held
| dear for years, and is still on our About page to this day, is
| AnandTech's rebuke of sensationalism, link baiting, and the path
| to shallow 10-o'clock-news reporting. It has been our mission
| over the past 27 years to inform and educate our readers by
| providing high-quality content
|
| That's the core of it. And too bad they're off. Finding a news
| outlet that isn't "tweeting" an article and isn't a blog post on
| HN was great. And while they mention Tom's hardware. It always
| felt (to me) less verbose where I needed it.
|
| Fair well.
| harshaxnim wrote:
| Tangential - your last line made me think about what "Fare
| well" means. Weird that I come across it so often, but never
| stopped to think what it means. :)
| throw0101d wrote:
| > _Tangential - your last line made me think about what "Fare
| well" means._
|
| Fare is unrelated to fair:
|
| > _From Middle English farewel, from fare wel! (and the
| variants with the personal pronoun "fare ye well" and "fare
| you well" used in the Renaissance), an imperative expression,
| possibly further derived from Old English _far wel!,
| equivalent to fare ("to fare, travel, journey") + well.*
|
| * https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/farewell#Etymology
|
| * https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fare
|
| So to say "farewell" to someones is "have a good journey (in
| life?)".
| frankvdwaal wrote:
| In German there's a similar word, "fahren", which means
| driving or traveling. In Dutch the word "varen" mean to
| sail or in an older sense of the word "to move".
|
| I can only assume, but considering the Dutch "vaarwel" is
| so close to English, I'm going to guess it means "Go well"
| - or more poetically when speaking of one's path in life:
| may fate treat you well.
| vanviegen wrote:
| The Dutch word "welvarend" (literally "well-sailing")
| translates to "prosperous" in English. So "vaarwel" or
| "farewell" is kind of a medieval way of saying "live long
| and prosper". :-)
| ljm wrote:
| Google captured the web with their search product. Then they
| monopolised it with Adsense.
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| And absolutely did not optimize for returning quality
| information.
| xwowsersx wrote:
| farewell*
| lofaszvanitt wrote:
| I was really surprised they survived this long. Long, overly
| elaborate, badly structured, too technical, and hence boring
| for the average joe, kinda articles all around.
|
| Future plc and their rooted in the 2000s, absolutely horrible
| website structure that is forced on every news outlet they
| own... bleh. Ancient mammoths need a good spanking.
| mise_en_place wrote:
| There just isn't a need for legacy media anymore. Anyone can
| shitpost all day on X or Threads and reach an audience 10x that
| of AnandTech or any other traditional media outfit.
| ahmetyas01 wrote:
| I feel old now. Shoot me
| Venkatesh10 wrote:
| Farewell team. One of my favorite quality reads of genuine
| hardware pieces on the Internet.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Kudos from my 2003 self, when Anandtech helped me build my first
| PC for university.
|
| https://www.anandtech.com/show/1094
|
| Uni had fiber to the dorm room, so I was interested in maximizing
| available bandwidth through the rest of the system. Which in P4 /
| PCI days wasn't trivial!
|
| Ironically enough, I still have that motherboard downstairs in a
| backup system, humming away... with a Pentium M via adapter. :)
|
| Couldn't bring myself to put it out to pasture, and thought it
| was an interesting inflection point as "the last of the Netburst"
| era.
|
| Interestingly enough, one of my favorite uni classes was on
| microprocessor design, taught by someone who apparently taught
| Anand at NC (Tom Conte).
|
| RIP. But better to call it quits when they're playing the send-
| off music.
| praveen9920 wrote:
| With 27 years of people's trust, I think this is one of the best
| exits of tech history.
|
| Even though it's not best financially.
| coding123 wrote:
| What killed it? that's terrible
| froggertoaster wrote:
| RIP Anandtech.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-08-30 23:00 UTC)