[HN Gopher] Anandtech.com now redirects to its forums
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Anandtech.com now redirects to its forums
Author : kmfrk
Score : 255 points
Date : 2025-08-02 13:27 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (forums.anandtech.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (forums.anandtech.com)
| kmfrk wrote:
| anandtech.com now redirects to the forums instead its front page
| of articles. Here is what the website previously tweeted about
| its future a year ago after winding down operations.[1]
|
| Originally heard this via
| https://x.com/System360Cheese/status/1951501044875477254.
|
| The latest indexed frontpage in the Internet Archive is from July
| 28:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20250728143805/https://www.anand....
|
| The original farewell article, which is now only readable through
| the IA:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20250726035557/https://www.anand....
| One paragraph reads:
|
| "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. So
| that all of the content we've created over the years remains
| accessible and citable. Even without new articles to add to the
| collection, I expect that many of the things we've written over
| the past couple of decades will remain relevant for years to come
| - and remain accessible just as long."
|
| [1]: https://x.com/anandtech/status/1829489697384706555
| > AnandTech will stay online so readers can continue to access
| articles from our archive, and the forums will remain active to
| serve our community. Our sister site Tom's Hardware, will also
| continue to publish all the latest news, reviews and more from
| the PC world. Thank you all
| layer8 wrote:
| So "indefinitely" turned out to be only 11 months.
| musicale wrote:
| "years to come"
| gblargg wrote:
| Just like lifetime subscriptions and warranties.
| musicale wrote:
| Future PLC seems to be gradually shutting down all of its
| activities, one publication or site at a time.
|
| It's a shame because many of them had been publishing for
| decades. Were they really completely unsustainable? The ads in
| magazines like Computer Music and Future Music were actually
| interesting and relevant, unlike typical garbage web ads.
| fredoralive wrote:
| I think it's more they've shifted away from their original
| focus as a specialist computer publisher into a more general
| publisher. I realised a couple of months ago they publish the
| TV Times nowadays, and also stuff like Country Life and Home
| and Gardens. Tech stuff is just another line on the balance
| sheet now.
|
| I doubt if magazines (and websites etc.) in general are doing
| great, but for obvious reasons the more techy stuff is
| probably going to be a bit more vulnerable, particularly in
| print.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| The fact that Future Publishing - once the scrappy 90s
| flagship of new tech journalism - now owns Country Life is
| something I will always find hilarious.
| tiffanyh wrote:
| > _" the site itself won't be going anywhere for a while"_
|
| Seems people focused too much on the phrase "I am happy to
| report".
|
| When the actual key phrase people missed was "for a while".
|
| In hindsight, that implies knowledge it would be shutdown at
| some future date.
|
| And while many people understand "indefinitely" to mean
| "unlimited", it also has a secondary meaning of "unspecified
| period of time".
| kcb wrote:
| This is not great. Decades of hardware reviews all the way back
| to the first GPUs becoming less accessible. Why would anyone
| consider taking it down when there was so much content that could
| be hosted with little effort while still making some ad revenue?
| Anandtech articles were still at the top of many Google searches.
| nerdsniper wrote:
| Being near the top of Google means you get an incredible amount
| of bot and AI traffic which costs a surprisingly large amount
| of money.
| dangus wrote:
| Simultaneously, the fact that anyone with any supposed
| business experience gifted that priceless level of ranking
| would decide to shut down the business is insane.
|
| Like, the fact that someone is making money off of
| MySpace.com right now and Anandtech couldn't swing it makes
| zero logical sense. To me it feels like they tried nothing
| and were all out of ideas.
|
| But that's private equity for you.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| I'm still upset Rakuten shutdown fatwallet. Those forums
| were the best.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FatWallet
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Any time private equity does something stupid or short-
| sighted, remember this:
|
| Private equity firms - or, at least, the ones that people
| complain about - don't own their own capital. They have to
| rent it from somewhere else, and those people get paid
| first.
|
| The PE firm only really gets paid for their expertise when
| they make their hurdle. Ergo, PE is incentivized to make
| terribly short-sighted business decisions, because those
| are the ones that will bring in the money to make their
| hurdle. They get caught in a loop of buying and gutting
| otherwise productive businesses.
|
| This capital structure made sense back when PE was a tiny
| part of the economy that bought and modernized small
| businesses, but now PE is more akin to a failing empire;
| with an entitled aristocratic class that will shiv any
| leader that tries to change the structure to be more
| sustainable. They are spending $2000 on candles and the
| candles have knives.
| bapak wrote:
| Static hosting is essentially free. Add ads and it's a cash
| machine, not the opposite. Either there's something that they
| didn't tell us or they're incompetent.
|
| The only thing needed is a staticization of their website,
| which any CMS they had could very easily be set up to do.
| Look at the archives of NYT, they're barebone pages that
| preserve the content without any dynamic areas.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| It is certainly not free at "hundreds of thousands of
| requests per minute" scale.
| doctaj wrote:
| Wouldn't Cloudflare's free CDN handle that? That kind of
| traffic is dirt cheap.
| hansvm wrote:
| It's not free, but it's not expensive.
|
| Server load at that scale is measured in single-digit
| dollars per month, and bandwidth _might_ require two
| pipes with enough images being loaded. Multiply by 20 for
| replication and latency issues, and you're still only
| talking $200/month.
|
| As a ballpark, even bad ad impressions bring in
| $10/mille, maybe $1/mille for something unintrusive. Does
| Anandtech get more than 200k impressions per month? If
| we're talking about a "hundreds of thousands of requests
| per minute" scale then I would certainly hope so.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| That's the irony: forum traffic has shit cpm, but that's
| what they're keeping alive (for now).
|
| Users coming direct from organic search to an article
| tends to have the best: they're more likely to be buyers
| and/or find the ads interesting.
|
| Main downside with ads on tech sites is their users block
| ads _a lot_.
| ivape wrote:
| Why would anyone take down a site like this? The content
| is done, the site is page ranked to the top, it's passive
| money.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Because their revenue department doesn't talk to their
| content department.
| bravesoul2 wrote:
| Embarrassingly parallelisable around the globe and
| embarrassingly easy technically to point DNS to a CDN.
|
| Even if you have a server doing something 100k rpm isn't
| insane amount of traffic to handle. It requires a
| relatively modest server.
| kachapopopow wrote:
| It's most definitely free - cloudflare won't even ask you
| for the business plan (as long as their CDN's are caching
| properly). I had a site serving 90tb/month on a free plan
| (99.87% of the traffic was cached).
| monkey26 wrote:
| Not free after a certain point then gets expensive fast as
| you move out to CDNs.
| joks wrote:
| I wonder if Anubis or something could have been a viable
| solution but I'm sure they thought of that
| vachina wrote:
| It's only expensive if you're paying the AWS, GCP tax.
| They're stupid expensive for simple file hosting, and for no
| good reason.
| merb wrote:
| That is only true if you not use their cdns
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Sadly, I've had to resort to ChatGPT for stuff like this. Their
| internal archive will last longer.
|
| Of course, now there's less and less of a way to see if it's
| hallucinating.
|
| Going through this with an old hardware project where ChatGPT
| says _____ vulnerability exists in their early units, but
| zeeero references, even on archive.org
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Maybe they age hoping for a buyout.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| They were already bought out. By Purch in 2014, and then
| Future [0] in 2018.
|
| This reads like some shit-for-brains VP at the acquirer
| couldn't figure out how to make it work, so they're putting
| it on ice.
|
| The most destructive part of acquisitions seems to be the
| acquirer assigning a low-talent leader to the new
| acquisition, who then by virtue of no experience runs it into
| the ground, then blames its failure on the company itself.
|
| [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_plc
| bwb wrote:
| God this is sad :(
| dangle1 wrote:
| A forum member says that an archive exists:
|
| https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/anandtech-editorial-ann...
| 5pl1n73r wrote:
| Just learned they've stopped publishing. Sad! The old web is
| really dying. Seems like a bug though? They said they'll keep the
| site up "indefinitely".
| bee_rider wrote:
| Chips and Cheese seems like a basically fine replacement for
| Anandtech. Things change, and the internet has gotten worse
| since then, but specifically chip benchmarking doesn't seem too
| bad.
| smueller1234 wrote:
| I think Chips and Cheese is more like a fine replacement for
| realworldtech.com sans the toxic and highly educational and
| entertaining forums. Anandtech was much more accessible to
| the general tech public, but also more commercial and thus
| hit and miss on the content (no judgement intended, gotta
| eat).
| icepush wrote:
| Indefinitely in the sense of an unknown amount of time (Not
| infinitely)
| debugnik wrote:
| From another comment here, they did say:
|
| > I expect that many of the things we've written over the
| past couple of decades will remain relevant for years to come
| - and remain accessible just as long.
| eddiewithzato wrote:
| Old web died when youtube reviews became more profitable.
|
| It's sad because I miss printed content like tech magazines.
| vachina wrote:
| We've gone full circle now with video summarizers turning
| videos back into text.
| dang wrote:
| Related, I guess:
|
| _AnandTech Farewell_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41399872 - Aug 2024 (598
| comments)
| lgats wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20250726001915/https://www.anand...
| joecool1029 wrote:
| https://archive.ph/bewtN
| bananapub wrote:
| did they not provide a copy of the CMS to the Internet Archive??!
| neuroelectron wrote:
| People probably already archived it on there themselves.
| Aardwolf wrote:
| Interesting, usually it's the forums of websites that die first,
| instead of the static content, due to requiring active
| maintenance and moderation...
| Numerlor wrote:
| Already got bit by this, remembered an external SSD I opened had
| a review there and wanted to compare hardware, and wasn't able to
| get to the review
| giantfrog wrote:
| Big loss for the web.
| stuffoverflow wrote:
| Archiveteam did a full site crawl[1] when Anandtech announced
| they were stopping. You can browse the warc.gz files like a
| regular web page using https://replayweb.page
|
| Alternatively you could use solrwayback[2] to index and browse
| the warc files.
|
| 1:
| https://archive.fart.website/archivebot/viewer/job/202409012...
|
| 2: https://github.com/netarchivesuite/solrwayback
| seabass-labrax wrote:
| Also Kiwix[1] is an excellent app for browsing websites
| offline. You can use warc2zim[2] to convert the WARC files to
| ZIM files for use with Kiwix.
|
| I was pleasantly surprised to find that the DWDS (digital
| dictionary of the German language) app is actually Kiwix!
|
| [1]: https://www.kiwix.org/
|
| [2]: https://github.com/openzim/warc2zim
| formerly_proven wrote:
| > Kiwix
|
| ... I haven't heard this name in 15 years probably. Back then
| you could bring Wikipedia offline on a laptop, it was only
| around 20-25 GB.
| badsectoracula wrote:
| You can still bring Wikipedia offline on a laptop (and
| mobile phone, for some of the larger ones), it is just that
| you'd need around 100GB instead. There is even a library[0]
| you can use to do your own wikipedia viewer.
|
| [0] https://github.com/openzim/libzim
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Yes and much less than 100 if you can do without images
| joshvm wrote:
| I really like having the mobile version for fast searches,
| often faster than online. Useful for example while hiking
| or other out -of-network places. Even some big stores have
| zero signal inside and sometimes I want to look up things.
| You can also get almost any Stack Exchange site.
|
| If you live in a low, but not zero, bandwidth
| environment... since the rise of LLMs it's now cheaper to
| have the models do your dirty work. Before, you might have
| to search through pages of results, load MBs of data and
| still not find the answer. Offloading that to a data center
| and getting a few hundred kB back is convenient. Coupled
| with Kiwix and you can do quite a lot with a lousy internet
| connection.
| rapnie wrote:
| This is a bit tangential, but is there a good way to archive
| Discourse forums and turn them into regular websites? Anyone
| have experience to share?
| creatonez wrote:
| Not even techy people can keep a list of simple URL redirects
| active?
| pimlottc wrote:
| Pretty sure the techy people have left the building
| cnst wrote:
| I honestly don't understand why companies do this. There's still
| SO MUCH traffic from Google for these things.
|
| I've routinely went to AnandTech EXCLUSIVELY from Google. This
| means that their "news" and new content is of little relevance to
| me, as it's usually something from a few years prior that I'm
| reading over there. Yet somehow, "have to publish every day"?!
|
| Part of me thinks that this is related to the inefficiencies of
| all these CMS, where it costs too much to run the site compared
| to the revenue from the ads.
|
| Or is there another reason?
|
| Frankly, as an nginx "practitioner", all of these sites could
| basically be cached and served from a single $50/mo server from
| Hetzner, Online or OVH. Aren't they're getting far more in ad
| revenue than that? How does it make any sense to close the shop
| when you've got such a treasure trove that you could continue
| milking easily for at least like half a decade?
| mpclark wrote:
| Those who are currently publishing will tell you otherwise;
| traffic from Google has dropped off a cliff. There's a little
| bit of long tail, but nothing like the volumes the tech media
| built its businesses around.
| jonatron wrote:
| If I look at another tech site that stopped publishing, but
| where the content going back to year 2000 is still online
| [1], there's very little human traffic, vast majority is bot
| traffic.
|
| [1] https://hexus.net/tech/reviews/cpu/132-amd-duron-850/
| idonotknowwhy wrote:
| This sucks. Same with cnet, so many spec sheets for old crt
| monitors gone
| wkat4242 wrote:
| It was already over when its namesake left for Apple really.
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