I have very strong, probably controversial, feeling on arstechnica, but I believe the acquisition from Condé Nast has been a tragedy.
Ars writers used to be actual experts, sometimes even phd level, on technical fields. And they used to write fantastical and very informative articles.
Who is left now?
There are still a couple of good writers from the old guard and the occasional good new one, but the website is flooded with "tech journalist", claiming to be "android or Apple product experts" or stuff like that, publishing articles that are 90% press material from some company and most of the times seems to have very little technical knowledge.
They also started writing product reviews that I would not be surprised to find out being sponsored, given their content.
Also what's the business with those weirdly formatted articles from wired?
Still a very good website but the quality is diving.
Oddly enough it's not the first time I've seen their perceived recent drop in quality blamed on this. Just weird that it's happened twice - wonder where this narrative is coming from.
I read ars technica during undergrad over 20 years ago now. It complemented my learning in cpu architecture quite well. While in class we learned old stuff, they covered the modern Intel things. And also, who could forget the fantastically detailed and expert macOS reviews. I’ve never seen any reviews of any kind like that since.
I dropped ars from my rss sometime around covid when they basically dropped their journalism levels to reddit quality. Same hive mind and covering lots of non technical (political) topics. No longer representing its namesake!
It gets pretty bad at times. Here's one of the most mindlessly uncritical pieces I've seen, which seems to be a press release from Volkswagen: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2017/03/volkswagen-unveils-sedr... Look at the image captions gushing about the "roomy interior" of a vehicle that doesn't even exist! I actually wrote in to say how disappointed I was in this ad/press release material, and the response was "That was not a VW ad and we were not paid by VW for that or any other story". I find it interesting that they only denied the ad part, not the press release part...
"I'm a professional shopper, and here's what I say you should buy" because someone sent me a free version of it or just straight copy to use in my listicle.
It is sad that this is what journalism has come to. It is even sadder that it works.
Wirecutter was a good premise, but now it and everyone copying it are untrustworthy.
It feels like the human version of AI hallucination: saying what they think is convincing without regard for if it's sincere. And because it mimics trusted speech, it can slip right by your defense mechanisms.
Wirecutter still seems pretty good for stuff you aren't really expert on or have strong opinions about. But that was true of Consumer Reports in the old days too. Not saying it's perfect but, especially for low-value purchases, you probably won't go too far wrong.
They are just lazy / understaffed. It's hard to make $ in journalism. A longstanding and popular way to cut corners is to let the industry you cover do most of the work for you. You just re-package press releases. You have plausible content for a fraction of the effort / cost.
Unfortunately, government is like that were most bills are written by lobbyists and barely if at all modified by the actual congress critter sponsoring it.
They are basically the embodiment of the fact that sites and organizations don't matter, but individuals do. I think the overwhelming majority of everything on Ars is garbage. But on the other hand they also run Eric Berger's space column [1] which is certainly one of the best ones out there. So don't ignore those names on tops of articles. If you find something informative, well sourced, and so on - there's a good chance most their other writing is of a similar standard.
Ars is already a anti-Elon echo chamber. I stopped paying my subscription after a moderator endorsed a commenter issuing a (almost certainly empty) death threat to Elon.
I think death threats are a bit too far.
But in that environment I have to applause Eric for sticking to the technical and not giving in to the angry mob think that surrounds him. A true tech journalist with integrity.
A mouth piece would be lauding Elon where uncalled for. I've never seen him do that, but feel free to prove me wrong!
Imo Eric Berger and Beth Mole are the only parts of ars worth a damn anymore. If they started their own blog I would be happy to pay a subscription to them
Or many other sources. If you’re writing about Space, you kinda need to cover SpaceX. If you’re opening critical of everything the owner says, pretty soon you won’t have any sources at SpaceX to give you the insights you need to do your job. I get the impression that the space field is pretty small, so you might not want to burn too many bridges.
Also, mission lengths can cover decades. In this case, it might be best to have a short memory when the story has a long time horizon.
I think the fact that they one of the last places surviving from that generation of the Internet says a lot. The Condé Nast acquisition may have been a tragedy, but they managed to survive for this long. They’ve been continuously publishing online for about 30 years. It’s honestly amazing that they’ve managed to last this long.
Yes, it’s very different than it was back in the day. You don’t see 20+ page reviews of operating systems anymore, but I still think it’s a worthwhile place to visit.
Trying to survive in this online media market has definitely taken a toll. This current mistake makes me sad.
Their review of MacOS 26 is 79 pages when downloaded as a pdf, so they still sometimes have in depth articles. But I agree that that level of detail isn’t as common as in the past.
A tragedy, yes. I can't be the only old fart around here with fond memories of John Siracusa's macOS ("OS X") reviews & Jon "Hannibal" Stokes' deep dives in CPU microarchitectures...
Dr Dobbs was pretty good until almost the end, no? If memory serves me well, I recall the magazine got thinner and more sparse towards the end, but still high signal-to-noise ratio. Quite the opposite of Ars T.
Huge debt of gratitude to DDJ. I remember taking the bus to the capital every month just to buy the magazine on the newsstand.
> Ars writers used to be actual experts, sometimes even phd level, on technical fields. And they used to write fantastical and very informative articles. Who is left now?
What places on the internet remains where articles are written by actual experts? I know only of a few, and they get fewer every year.
https://theconversation.com/us/who-we-are is one of my favorites. Global academics writing about their research when something happens in the world or when they are published in a journal.
One other thing people might like about the conversation is that it has a bunch of regional subsections so it isn't overrun by US news like a lot of news sites. Well outside the US section of course. I know I personally appreciate having another source of informed writting that also covers local factors and events.
That may be for the technology and science sections. But the politics section is clearly pushing an agenda with regard to the current US administration - even though it is an agenda many people online might agree with. That section is not global, it is US-centric, and it heavily favours the popular side of the issue.
I like this aphorism someone once stated on bothsides-ism: When an arson burns down your home you don't pause to consider their side of the situation. Standing up to a bully doesn't mean the bully is being treated unfairly. They're just not accustomed to pushback on their BS and quickly don the caul of victimhood whenever their position is exposed.
Or the other side of at what point into ending capitalism in favor of socialism should that stop?
Yes, I enjoy "both sides" coverage when it's done in earnest. What passes for that today is two people representing the extremes of either spectrum looking for gotcha moments as an "owning" moment. We haven't seen a good "both sides" in decades
I'm not pointing out a contradiction. I am pointing out that this site - which otherwise seems great - it heavily promoting the popular-online side of a very controversial subject.
It looks like they know how to grow an audience at the expense of discourse, because those adherent to the popular-online side will heavily attack all publications that discuss the other side. Recognising this, it is hard to seriously consider their impartiality in other fields. It's very much the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect.
"Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know."
> - it heavily promoting the popular-online side of a very controversial subject
Any specific examples? I took a quick browse but didn't find anything that fit what you're talking about, and what you're saying is a bit vague (maybe because I'm not from the US). Could you link a specific article and then tell us what exactly is wrong?
techbriefs, photonics spectra, photonics focus, EAA Sport Aviation? I don't think it's going to be anything super popular, to become popular you have to appeal to a broad audience. But in niches there is certainly very high quality material. It also won't be (completely) funded by advertising.
Run by a Dr. Ian Cutress. Never heard about before, seems to describe themselves like this:
> Industry Analyst, More Than Moore. Youtube Influencer and Educator.
Seems they're one example of the sad trend of people going from being experts and instead diving into "influencing" instead, which comes with a massive list of drawbacks.
The main problem with technology coverage is you have one of 3 types of writers in the space:
1. Prosumer/enthusiasts who are somewhat technical, but mostly excitement
2. People who have professional level skills and also enjoy writing about it
3. Companies who write things because they sell things
A lot of sites are in category 1 - mostly excitement/enthusiasm, and feels.
Anandtech, TechReport, and to some extent Arstechnica (specially John Siracusa's OS X reviews) are the rare category 2.
Category 3 are things like the Puget Systems blog where they benchmark hardware, but also sell it, and it functions more as a buyer information.
The problem is that category 2 is that they can fairly easily get jobs in industry that pay way more than writing for a website. I'd imagine that when Anand joined Apple, this was likely the case, and if so that makes total sense.
I got very tired of seeing the same video thumbnails over and over.
It seemed like at some point they were pushing into video, of which there were some good ones they put out, but then they stopped. They kept the video links in the articles but since there are only a handful you'll just see the same ones over and over.
I've probably seen the first 3 or 4 seconds of the one with the Dead Space guy about a hundred times now.
I used to read it daily. Even continued for a few years after the acquisition. But at this point, I haven't looked at it in years. Even tend to skip the articles that make it to the first page of HN. Of course, most of the original writers I still follow on social media, and some have started their own Substack publications.
I think fantastical isn’t totally inaccurate, and I’m not being snarky (for once). The personal observations and sometimes colorful language has been something I like about Ars. Benj in particular, with his warm tributes to BBSes. Or Jim Salter’s very human networking articles. The best stuff on Ars is both technically sound and rich with human experience. “Fantastical” taken to mean something like, capturing the thrills and aspirations that emerge from our contact with technology, seems fair I think.
I’ll be interested in finding out more about just what the hell happened here. I hardly think of Benj or Kyle as AI cowboy hacks, something doesn’t add up
I confess I find the growing prevalence of these sorts of errors on HN dispiriting. Programming requires precision in code; I’d argue software engineering requires precision in language, because it involves communicating effectively with people.
In any single instance I don’t get very exercised - we tend to be able to infer what someone means. But the sheer volume of these malapropisms tells me people are losing their grip on our primary form of communication.
Proper dictionaries should be bundled free with smartphones. Apple even has some sort of license as you can pull up definitions via context menus. But a standalone dictionary app you must obtain on your own. (I have but most people will not.)
Jesus christ man, you are pulling out a lot from a single typo, eh?
English is just not my first language (and not the last either). Having an accent or the occasional misspelling on some forum has never impacted me professionally.
Yeah, I was very active on the ars forums back in the day, and after the buyout things initially were ok, but started go do down hill pretty clearly once the old guard of authors started leaving.
It's a shame because the old ars had a surprisingly good signal to noise ratio vs other big sites of that era.
Culture was is helluva drug. The desire of the authors to pledge political allegiance when they don't have the capacity to think of nothing original or innovative on a topic gets tiring fast. In a way Gawker won - now every media outlet is them.
I got banned for calling out the shilling back right after the acquisition. Apparently that was a personal attack on the quality of the author. It's gone downhill from there. I used to visit it every day, now I mostly forget it exists
Well I am calling out an entire class of journalist. Every time I've made a similar statement I got some angry answer (or got my post hidden or removed).
Ars has been going downhill for sometime now. I think it's difficult for a lot of these bigger publishers to be anything other than access journalism and advertising. I'm not saying Ars is fully there yet, but the pull is strong.
The comments section on Ars is particularly depressing. I've been posting there for two decades and watched it slowly devolve from a place where thoughtful discussions happened to now just being one of the worst echo chambers on the internet, like a bad subreddit. I've made suggestions over the years in their public feedback surveys to alter their forum software to discourage mob behavior, but they don't seem to be doing anything about it.
They don't actually publish the comments under the article, only a link. I've long suspected sites doing that are fully aware of how shit the comment section is, and try to hide it from casual viewers while keeping the nutjob gallery happy.
This goes back a lot farther with Ars. They done this for years because their comments section is driven by forum software. The main conversations happen in the forums. They are then reformatted for a the comment view.
So, their main goal wasn’t to hide the comments, but push people to forums where there is a better format for conversation.
Most mainstream news sites around here have by now hidden the comment section somehow, either making it folded by default or just moving it to the bottom of the page below "related news" sections and the like.
Hard agree.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/06/meta-debuts-playstati... is an example I remember. The subject matter of the is not controversial (just another Game Pass like subscription), but the comment section is full of -- yes you've guessed it -- Meta BAD! There is absolutely no meaningful discussion of the service itself.
I mostly stopped paying attention to the comment section after that, and Ars in general.
Philosophically I want to agree with you more but Meta is the informational equivalent of RJ Reynolds. They’ve facilitated crime waves (remember all of the hand-wringing about shoplifting which died down when the government went after Facebook marketplace and Amazon?), supported genocide, and elevated some of the worst voices in the world. Giving them more money and social control is a risk which should be discussed.
The switch to their newest forum software seems to discourage any kind of actual conversation. If I recall correctly, the last iteration was also unthreaded, but somehow it was easier for a back-and-forth to develop. Now it is basically just reactions-- like YouTube comments (which, ironically, is actually threaded).
Is HN really the last remaining forum for science and technology conversations? If so... very depressing.
Try reading Slashdot these days and it's the same story. I stopped reading regularly when cmdrtaco left but still check in occasionally out of misplaced nostalgia or something.. The comment section is like a time capsule from the 00s, the same ideas and arguments have been echoing back and forth there for years, seemingly losing soul and nuance with each echo. Bizarre, and sad.
They should get rid of the fairly extremely prominent badges of years-on-the-forum and number-of-comments. Maybe that'd help quell some of the echo down, because every comment section on Ars articles is 10+ year old accounts all arguing with each other.
The bigger story is the way tech companies sucked the oxygen out of journalism. This started with capturing a growing chunk of ad revenue but then became editorial control as everyone started picking headlines, writing styles, and publication schedules to please the tech companies which control whether they receive 80% of their traffic.
Everyone writes like Buzzfeed now because Twitter and Facebook made that the most profitable; Google/Twitter/Facebook need a constant stream of new links and incentivize publishing rapidly rather than in-depth; and Facebook severely damaged many outfits with the fraudulent pivot to video pretending they’d start paying more.
Many of the problems we see societally stem back to people not paying for media, leaving the information space dominated by the interest of advertisers and a few wealthy people who will pay to promote their viewpoints.
> I think it's difficult for a lot of these bigger publishers to be anything other than access journalism and advertising
Maybe this is exactly the issue? Every news company is driven like a for-profit business that has to grow and has to make the owners more money, maybe this is just fundamentally incompatible with actual good journalism and news?
Feels like there are more and more things that have been run in the typical capitalistic fashion, yet the results always get worse the more they lean into it, not just news but seems widespread in life.
The story is credited to Benj Edwards and Kyle Orland. I've filtered out Edwards from my RSS reader a long time ago, his writing is terrible and extremely AI-enthusiastic. No surprise he's behind an AI-generated story.
Would make for a good book, company hires famous writer, trains an ai on them, tortures them to sign over their likeness rights and then murders them. Keeps up appearances of life via video gen, voice gen and writing gen.
> his writing is terrible and extremely AI-enthusiastic
I disagree, his writings are generally quite good. For example, in a recent article [1] on a hostile Gemini distillation attempt, he gives a significant amount of background, including the relevant historical precedent of Alpaca, which almost any other journalist wouldn't even know about.
This is fascinating because Ars has probably _the most_ anti-AI readership of the tech publications. If the author did use AI to generate the story (or even help) their will be rioting for sure
This is a bummer. Ars is one of the few news sources I consistently read. I give them money because I use an ad blocker and want to support them.
I have noticed them doing more reporting on reporting. I am sure they are cash strapped like everyone. There are some pretty harsh critics here. I hope they, too are paying customers or allowing ads. Otherwise, they are just pissing into the wind.
Oh my goodness. I hope the Matplotlib maintainer is holding it together, must be terrible for him. It's like being run over by press car after having an accident.
I used to go to Ars daily, loved them... but at some point during the last 5 years or so they decided to lean into politics and that's when they lost me. I understand a technology journal will naturally have some overlap with politics, but they don't even try to hide the agenda anymore.
I'm curious as to what their agenda is? I don't read it very often but I've not noticed anything overt. Could you give me any examples? I'd love to know more.
_Daily_ hit pieces on Elon Musk (or Musk companies), going for something like a decade. These have petered out somewhat since he left DOGE. But they started way back before he should have had that much notoriety.
They were rightfully been calling out the grift at Tesla. On the SpaceX front they've been his biggest cheerleader (even dismissing other stories like the sexual harrassment)
The agenda is to highlight when Trump and Elon blunder but ignore neutral or positive stories. Go to the front page right now and look at the articles, I see four mentioning Trump that are negatively charged. That isn't to say any one article is untrue, but hard to miss the curated pattern
"Agenda" has become code for "ideas I don't agree with", used by people who mistakenly believe it (politics) can be compartmentalized from other everyday topics and only trotted out at election time.
I disagree. Agendas are real things. Just because they have one, doesn't mean it is inherently bad or even a disagreeable position... but some people just don't like to be "sold to", regardless of the topic.
I'm afraid both are true. And they often go hand in hand. Often, someone calling out an agenda is doing so to sell theirs. (See also "ideology", which is often treated as a synonym.)
For some people perhaps. For me personally, I find some sites purposefully interject their 'agenda', either left or right into their journalism to the detriment of the piece. You're not going to a get a truely subjective view on things anywhere but some places are skewed to the point that you can't tell if vital information is being witheld or under reported.
Politics on Ars makes me think of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. At some level of the decision making process for the publication you have to suspect that not only is being done just for engagement but also that there's no respect for the audience.
Ars is more complicated - I mean, RFK jr. comes out against vaccines - is that sciency or politics? Both? But ultimately they're just playing to the audience in the worst way.
Why should they? There's no such thing as "unbiased journalism", I prefer those that are more open about their politics than those that are poorly trying to hide it.
I enjoyed Ars Technica and their forums in the early days, until one of their staff members, Peter Bright aka Dr. Pizza was one of the nastiest forum people I’ve encountered. He got away with behavior that would get anyone else banned because he was staff. There was one point when they gave him a temporary ban, which seemed strange to me that they were banning their own employee from their own forums for a while instead of kicking an obvious problem person off of the staff.
They seemed overly protective of their own even in the face of obvious bad behavior.
It’s a site I want to like, but they have a history of protecting their own above all else. If they try to wash this story away as a mistake or error and let the writer stay then I wouldn’t be surprised at all.
I'm honestly shocked by this having been an Ars reader for over ten years. I miss the days when they would publish super in-depth articles on computing. Since the Conde Nast acquisition I basically only go to ars for Beth Mole's coverage which is still top notch. Other than that I've found that the Verge fulfills the need that I used to get from Ars. I also support the Verge as a paid subscriber and cannot recommend them enough.
There are some interesting dynamics going on at Ars. I get the sense that the first author on the pulled article, Benj Edwards, is trying to walk a very fine line between unbiased reporting, personal biases, and pandering to the biases of the audience -- potentially for engagement. I get the sense this represents a lot of the views of the entire publication on AI. In fact, there are some data points in this very thread.
For one, the commenters on Ars largely, extremely vocally anti-AI as pointed out by this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47015359 -- I'd say they're even more anti-AI than most HN threads.
So every time he says anything remotely positive about AI, the comments light up. In fact there's a comment in this very thread accusing him of being too pro-AI! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47013747 But go look at his work: anything positive about AI is always couched in much longer refrains about the risks of AI.
As an example, there has been a concrete instance of pandering where he posted a somewhat balanced article about AI-assisted coding, and the very first comment went like, "Hey did you forget about your own report about how the METR study found AI actually slowed developers down?" and he immediately updated the article to mention that study. (That study's come up a bunch of times but somehow, he's never mentioned the multiple other studies that show a much more positive impact from AI.)
So this fiasco, which has to be AI hallucinations somehow, in that environment is extremely weird.
As a total aside, in the most hilarious form of irony, their interview about Enshittification with Cory Doctorow himself crashed the browser on my car and my iPad multiple times because of ads. I kid you not. I ranted about it on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/kunalkandekar_enshittificatio...
This is what happens when you optimize for publishing speed over accuracy. But the deeper issue is attribution — if
Ars fabricated quotes, how many other outlets are doing the same with less prominent maintainers who won't notice?
Open source maintainers already deal with enough burnout without having words put in their mouths.
Ars still has some of the best comment sections out there. It's refreshing to hang with intelligent, funny people - just like the good old days on the Web.
* They are often late in reporting a story. This is fine for what Ars is, but that means by the time they publish a story, I have likely read the reporting and analysis elsewhere already, and whatever Ars has to say is stale
* There seem to be fewer long stories/deep investigations recently when competitors are doing more (e.g. Verge's brilliant reporting on Supernatural recently)
* The comment section is absolutely abysmal and rarely provides any value or insight. It maybe one of the worst echo chambers that is not 4chan or a subreddit, full of (one-sided) rants and whining without anything constructive that is often off topic. I already know what people will be saying there without opening the comment section, and I'm almost always correct. If the story has the word "Meta" anywhere in the article, you can be sure someone will say "Meta bad" in the comment, even if Meta is not doing anything negative or even controversial in the story. Disagree? Your comment will be downvoted to -100.
These days I just glance over the title, and if there is anything I haven't read about from elsewhere, I'll read the article and be done with it. And I click their articles much less frequently these days. I wonder if I should stop reading it completely.
There are still a few authors worth reading on Ars. Beth Mole has a loyal following for a reason-- her stories are interesting, engaging, and never fail to make me squirm with horror. Jonathan Gitlin has a tendency to drop into the forum to snipe at comments he does not like, and I have no interest in supercars, but by and large his automobile reporting is interesting. And if you like anything rocket related, Eric Berger is clearly passionate about the industry. There are a few other folks who are hit-or-miss like most journalists. I've found that Benj is mostly misses, and although I am always interested in what John Timmer writes about, I cannot seem to interpret his writing style. In general I skip the syndicated articles from Wired, etc, because they are either "nothings" or bad.
I think Dan Goodin sometimes writes deep analysis of security attacks, although his recent articles len towards surface level news stories that you can find everywhere.
Some companies have enough of a track record that they should be nuked from orbit, and "Company bad" is all that is worth saying. Meta is one of those companies. Palantir is another. Not holding them accountable and acting as if we should continue engaging with their products is part of the reason we are rapidly sliding towards dystopia
They also have a strange obsession with stories about vaccines, rare scary ailments, and child porn. I suppose these topics get them good engagement, but not something I want to read about (constantly) on a tech blog.
Take a look at the number of people who think vibe coding without reading the output is fine if it passes the tests who but are absolutely aghast at this.
I met him once when we were both in Seattle for a conference, and a group of us went out to eat. He definitely gave off an odd vibe, but at the time I attributed it to the typical not very socially adjusted nerd stuff.
But with the benefit of hindsight his conviction is not really that surprising now. Way back in the day he used to argue about age of consent laws on the forums a lot.
I never met her in person but I only had positive online interactions with his then wife. What a horrible thing for her.
I would like to give a small defense of Benj Edwards. While his coverage on Ars definitely has a positive spin on AI, his comments on social media are much less fawning. Ars is a tech-forward publication, and it is owned by a major corporation. Major corporations have declared LLMs to be the best thing since breathable air, and anyone who pushes back on this view is explicitly threatened with economic destitution via the euphemism "left behind." There's not a lot of paying journalism jobs out there, and people gotta eat, hence the perhaps more positive spin on AI from this author than is justified.
All that said, this article may get me to cancel the Ars subscription that I started in 2010. I've always thought Ars was one of the better tech news publications out there, often publishing critical & informative pieces. They make mistakes, no one is perfect, but this article goes beyond bad journalism into actively creating new misinformation and publishing it as fact on a major website. This is actively harmful behavior and I will not pay for it.
Taking it down is the absolute bare minimum, but if they want me to continue to support them, they need to publish a full explanation of what happened. Who used the tool to generate the false quotes? Was it Benj, Kyle, or some unnamed editor? Why didn't that person verify the information coming out of the tool that is famous for generating false information? How are they going to verify information coming out of the tool in the future? Which previous articles used the tool, and what is their plan to retroactively verify those articles?
I don't really expect them to have any accountability here. Admitting AI is imperfect would result in being "left behind," after all. So I'll probably be canceling my subscription at my next renewal. But maybe they'll surprise me and own up to their responsibility here.
This is also a perfect demonstration of how these AI tools are not ready for prime time, despite what the boosters say. Think about how hard it is for developers to get good quality code out of these things, and we have objective ways to measure correctness. Now imagine how incredibly low quality the journalism we will get from these tools is. In journalism correctness is much less black-and-white and much harder to verify. LLMs are a wildly inappropriate tool for journalists to be using.
Yeah, “we just made shit up in an article, destroying trust in our publication, but we will get around to investigating when we have a little free time in the next week or so.”
No, you just shipped the equivalent to a data-destroying bug: it’s all-hands-over-the-holiday-weekend time.
anybody else notice that the meatverse looks like it's full of groggy humans bumbling around getting there bearings after way too much of the wrong stuff consumed at a party wears off that realy wasn't fun at all.
A sort of technological hybernation that has gone on way too long.
I have very strong, probably controversial, feeling on arstechnica, but I believe the acquisition from Condé Nast has been a tragedy.
Ars writers used to be actual experts, sometimes even phd level, on technical fields. And they used to write fantastical and very informative articles. Who is left now?
There are still a couple of good writers from the old guard and the occasional good new one, but the website is flooded with "tech journalist", claiming to be "android or Apple product experts" or stuff like that, publishing articles that are 90% press material from some company and most of the times seems to have very little technical knowledge.
They also started writing product reviews that I would not be surprised to find out being sponsored, given their content.
Also what's the business with those weirdly formatted articles from wired?
Still a very good website but the quality is diving.
> I have very strong, probably controversial, feeling on arstechnica, but I believe the acquisition from Condé Nast has been a tragedy.
For the curious, this acquisition was 18 years ago.
Oddly enough it's not the first time I've seen their perceived recent drop in quality blamed on this. Just weird that it's happened twice - wonder where this narrative is coming from.
No, their quality has been dropping since the acquisition; it's just now gotten to the point where it cannot be explained away.
God, I didn't need to know that
How do I report online harassment? There's probably a button but I can't find it because I misplaced my reading glasses.
I read ars technica during undergrad over 20 years ago now. It complemented my learning in cpu architecture quite well. While in class we learned old stuff, they covered the modern Intel things. And also, who could forget the fantastically detailed and expert macOS reviews. I’ve never seen any reviews of any kind like that since.
I dropped ars from my rss sometime around covid when they basically dropped their journalism levels to reddit quality. Same hive mind and covering lots of non technical (political) topics. No longer representing its namesake!
I checked and was also expecting something different based on parent's comment.
Happened 18 years ago.
This is a hot take that has become room temp.
The transformation has been very slow I believe. They didn't really intrude too much the first few years. But maybe I remember wrong.
Boeing merged with McDonnell Douglas almost 30 years ago, but that's still a major reason they suck today.
It gets pretty bad at times. Here's one of the most mindlessly uncritical pieces I've seen, which seems to be a press release from Volkswagen: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2017/03/volkswagen-unveils-sedr... Look at the image captions gushing about the "roomy interior" of a vehicle that doesn't even exist! I actually wrote in to say how disappointed I was in this ad/press release material, and the response was "That was not a VW ad and we were not paid by VW for that or any other story". I find it interesting that they only denied the ad part, not the press release part...
As I mention in another comment, https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/01/exclusive-volvo-tells-u... is in a similar vein.
"I'm a professional shopper, and here's what I say you should buy" because someone sent me a free version of it or just straight copy to use in my listicle.
It is sad that this is what journalism has come to. It is even sadder that it works.
Wirecutter was a good premise, but now it and everyone copying it are untrustworthy.
It feels like the human version of AI hallucination: saying what they think is convincing without regard for if it's sincere. And because it mimics trusted speech, it can slip right by your defense mechanisms.
Wirecutter still seems pretty good for stuff you aren't really expert on or have strong opinions about. But that was true of Consumer Reports in the old days too. Not saying it's perfect but, especially for low-value purchases, you probably won't go too far wrong.
Any good idea will be copied by those with lesser motives.
I'm willing to believe it was not an ad.
They are just lazy / understaffed. It's hard to make $ in journalism. A longstanding and popular way to cut corners is to let the industry you cover do most of the work for you. You just re-package press releases. You have plausible content for a fraction of the effort / cost.
Unfortunately, government is like that were most bills are written by lobbyists and barely if at all modified by the actual congress critter sponsoring it.
I think that's much more common in state government (in the US).
Most bill in the US Congress are not actually meant to pass, they are just (often poorly written) PR stunts.
That car looks so unhappy :|
They are basically the embodiment of the fact that sites and organizations don't matter, but individuals do. I think the overwhelming majority of everything on Ars is garbage. But on the other hand they also run Eric Berger's space column [1] which is certainly one of the best ones out there. So don't ignore those names on tops of articles. If you find something informative, well sourced, and so on - there's a good chance most their other writing is of a similar standard.
[1] - https://arstechnica.com/author/ericberger/
Somehow, you picked the least credible Ars staffer to me.
Ah, and here my problem with Eric is he basically never criticizes Elon and only calls him "controversial". He's just a Musk mouthpiece at this point.
Ars is already a anti-Elon echo chamber. I stopped paying my subscription after a moderator endorsed a commenter issuing a (almost certainly empty) death threat to Elon.
I think death threats are a bit too far.
But in that environment I have to applause Eric for sticking to the technical and not giving in to the angry mob think that surrounds him. A true tech journalist with integrity.
A mouth piece would be lauding Elon where uncalled for. I've never seen him do that, but feel free to prove me wrong!
Imo Eric Berger and Beth Mole are the only parts of ars worth a damn anymore. If they started their own blog I would be happy to pay a subscription to them
What would you do if you loved space as much as he does? There are no other heroes to cheer for
Or many other sources. If you’re writing about Space, you kinda need to cover SpaceX. If you’re opening critical of everything the owner says, pretty soon you won’t have any sources at SpaceX to give you the insights you need to do your job. I get the impression that the space field is pretty small, so you might not want to burn too many bridges.
Also, mission lengths can cover decades. In this case, it might be best to have a short memory when the story has a long time horizon.
I think the fact that they one of the last places surviving from that generation of the Internet says a lot. The Condé Nast acquisition may have been a tragedy, but they managed to survive for this long. They’ve been continuously publishing online for about 30 years. It’s honestly amazing that they’ve managed to last this long.
Yes, it’s very different than it was back in the day. You don’t see 20+ page reviews of operating systems anymore, but I still think it’s a worthwhile place to visit.
Trying to survive in this online media market has definitely taken a toll. This current mistake makes me sad.
Their review of MacOS 26 is 79 pages when downloaded as a pdf, so they still sometimes have in depth articles. But I agree that that level of detail isn’t as common as in the past.
It’s good, too.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/09/macos-26-tahoe-the-a...
A tragedy, yes. I can't be the only old fart around here with fond memories of John Siracusa's macOS ("OS X") reviews & Jon "Hannibal" Stokes' deep dives in CPU microarchitectures...
John Siracusa's macOS reviews were so in-depth people even published reviews of his reviews.
Certainly not the only old fart ‘round these parts.
Your comment reminded me of Dr Dobbs Journal for some reason.
Anyone remember "Compute!"? I still have (mostly) fond memories of typing in games in Basic.
Actually, bugs in those listings were my first bug-hunts as a kid.
Dr Dobbs was pretty good until almost the end, no? If memory serves me well, I recall the magazine got thinner and more sparse towards the end, but still high signal-to-noise ratio. Quite the opposite of Ars T.
Huge debt of gratitude to DDJ. I remember taking the bus to the capital every month just to buy the magazine on the newsstand.
I finally subscribed to Dr. Dobbs for the Michael Abrash graphics articles, about a month before he ended them.
> Ars writers used to be actual experts, sometimes even phd level, on technical fields. And they used to write fantastical and very informative articles. Who is left now?
What places on the internet remains where articles are written by actual experts? I know only of a few, and they get fewer every year.
https://theconversation.com/us/who-we-are is one of my favorites. Global academics writing about their research when something happens in the world or when they are published in a journal.
One other thing people might like about the conversation is that it has a bunch of regional subsections so it isn't overrun by US news like a lot of news sites. Well outside the US section of course. I know I personally appreciate having another source of informed writting that also covers local factors and events.
That may be for the technology and science sections. But the politics section is clearly pushing an agenda with regard to the current US administration - even though it is an agenda many people online might agree with. That section is not global, it is US-centric, and it heavily favours the popular side of the issue.
You prefer a "both sides" style of political coverage?
At what point in the slide to authoritarianism should that stop? Where is the line?
I like this aphorism someone once stated on bothsides-ism: When an arson burns down your home you don't pause to consider their side of the situation. Standing up to a bully doesn't mean the bully is being treated unfairly. They're just not accustomed to pushback on their BS and quickly don the caul of victimhood whenever their position is exposed.
Or the other side of at what point into ending capitalism in favor of socialism should that stop?
Yes, I enjoy "both sides" coverage when it's done in earnest. What passes for that today is two people representing the extremes of either spectrum looking for gotcha moments as an "owning" moment. We haven't seen a good "both sides" in decades
I see the capitalism vs socialism as a spectrum with valid debate all along it.
I don't see how one honestly argues in favor of an authoritarian government
Ahh, you must be using the rational definition of socialism and not the extremist corrupted use as cover for dictators.
i don't think these are as contradictory as you make them out to be
I'm not pointing out a contradiction. I am pointing out that this site - which otherwise seems great - it heavily promoting the popular-online side of a very controversial subject.
It looks like they know how to grow an audience at the expense of discourse, because those adherent to the popular-online side will heavily attack all publications that discuss the other side. Recognising this, it is hard to seriously consider their impartiality in other fields. It's very much the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect.
"Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know."
-Michael Crichton
> - it heavily promoting the popular-online side of a very controversial subject
Any specific examples? I took a quick browse but didn't find anything that fit what you're talking about, and what you're saying is a bit vague (maybe because I'm not from the US). Could you link a specific article and then tell us what exactly is wrong?
I really hope _this_ quote is not fabricated - because what a fantastic quote!!
The Register? :)
https://www.theregister.com
techbriefs, photonics spectra, photonics focus, EAA Sport Aviation? I don't think it's going to be anything super popular, to become popular you have to appeal to a broad audience. But in niches there is certainly very high quality material. It also won't be (completely) funded by advertising.
lwn.net?
> What places on the internet remains where articles are written by actual experts?
The personal blogs of experts.
Examples? :)
First one that comes to mind is https://morethanmoore.substack.com/
Run by a Dr. Ian Cutress. Never heard about before, seems to describe themselves like this:
> Industry Analyst, More Than Moore. Youtube Influencer and Educator.
Seems they're one example of the sad trend of people going from being experts and instead diving into "influencing" instead, which comes with a massive list of drawbacks.
Damn, for someone asking specifically for experts with blogs, you sure have harsh opinion of experts with blogs!
Ian wrote a lot of in-depth technical reviews and articles at Anandtech. He’s not a nobody.
https://archive.is/2022.02.18-161603/https://www.anandtech.c...
The London review of Books frequently has domain experts writing their reviews.
https://www.404media.co/ I subscribe
It's worse than that, Condé Nast is owned by Advance Publications.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Advance_subsidiaries
They own a depressing number of "local" newspapers to project excessive influence.
> publishing articles that are 90% press material from some company and most of the times seems to have very little technical knowledge.
Unfortunately, this is my impression as well.
I really miss Anandtech's reporting, especially their deep dives and performance testing for new core designs.
The main problem with technology coverage is you have one of 3 types of writers in the space:
1. Prosumer/enthusiasts who are somewhat technical, but mostly excitement
2. People who have professional level skills and also enjoy writing about it
3. Companies who write things because they sell things
A lot of sites are in category 1 - mostly excitement/enthusiasm, and feels.
Anandtech, TechReport, and to some extent Arstechnica (specially John Siracusa's OS X reviews) are the rare category 2.
Category 3 are things like the Puget Systems blog where they benchmark hardware, but also sell it, and it functions more as a buyer information.
The problem is that category 2 is that they can fairly easily get jobs in industry that pay way more than writing for a website. I'd imagine that when Anand joined Apple, this was likely the case, and if so that makes total sense.
I got very tired of seeing the same video thumbnails over and over.
It seemed like at some point they were pushing into video, of which there were some good ones they put out, but then they stopped. They kept the video links in the articles but since there are only a handful you'll just see the same ones over and over.
I've probably seen the first 3 or 4 seconds of the one with the Dead Space guy about a hundred times now.
I used to read it daily. Even continued for a few years after the acquisition. But at this point, I haven't looked at it in years. Even tend to skip the articles that make it to the first page of HN. Of course, most of the original writers I still follow on social media, and some have started their own Substack publications.
I presume you meant "fantastic," not "fantastical"?
I think fantastical isn’t totally inaccurate, and I’m not being snarky (for once). The personal observations and sometimes colorful language has been something I like about Ars. Benj in particular, with his warm tributes to BBSes. Or Jim Salter’s very human networking articles. The best stuff on Ars is both technically sound and rich with human experience. “Fantastical” taken to mean something like, capturing the thrills and aspirations that emerge from our contact with technology, seems fair I think.
I’ll be interested in finding out more about just what the hell happened here. I hardly think of Benj or Kyle as AI cowboy hacks, something doesn’t add up
“Fantastical” means based on fantasy: not real. A fantastical journalism source is one filled with lies.
You seem to think it means “extra fantastic.” Not correct.
I confess I find the growing prevalence of these sorts of errors on HN dispiriting. Programming requires precision in code; I’d argue software engineering requires precision in language, because it involves communicating effectively with people.
In any single instance I don’t get very exercised - we tend to be able to infer what someone means. But the sheer volume of these malapropisms tells me people are losing their grip on our primary form of communication.
Proper dictionaries should be bundled free with smartphones. Apple even has some sort of license as you can pull up definitions via context menus. But a standalone dictionary app you must obtain on your own. (I have but most people will not.)
Jesus christ man, you are pulling out a lot from a single typo, eh? English is just not my first language (and not the last either). Having an accent or the occasional misspelling on some forum has never impacted me professionally.
Wanted to comment the same. Parent poster might not be aware that “fantastical” means “fantasy”.
But I think we do get his point regardless :)
It's funny because I assume "fantastical" was invented so people could still express the true meaning of fantastic, ie. a piece of fantasy.
Yeah, I was very active on the ars forums back in the day, and after the buyout things initially were ok, but started go do down hill pretty clearly once the old guard of authors started leaving.
It's a shame because the old ars had a surprisingly good signal to noise ratio vs other big sites of that era.
> what's the business with those weirdly formatted articles from wired?
You must have missed the 90's Wired magazine era with magenta text on a striped background and other goofiness. Weird formatting is their thing.
> they used to write fantastical and very informative articles
> Still a very good website
These are indeed quite controversial opinions on ars.
Culture was is helluva drug. The desire of the authors to pledge political allegiance when they don't have the capacity to think of nothing original or innovative on a topic gets tiring fast. In a way Gawker won - now every media outlet is them.
> the acquisition from Condé Nast
By Condé Nast? Or did they get acquired again?
I got banned for calling out the shilling back right after the acquisition. Apparently that was a personal attack on the quality of the author. It's gone downhill from there. I used to visit it every day, now I mostly forget it exists
Oh yes, quite a controversial take.
Well I am calling out an entire class of journalist. Every time I've made a similar statement I got some angry answer (or got my post hidden or removed).
The context here is this story, an AI Agent publishs a hit piece on the Matplotlib maintainer.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46990729
And the story from ars about it was apparently AI generated and made up quotes. Race to the bottom?
Ars has been going downhill for sometime now. I think it's difficult for a lot of these bigger publishers to be anything other than access journalism and advertising. I'm not saying Ars is fully there yet, but the pull is strong.
The comments section on Ars is particularly depressing. I've been posting there for two decades and watched it slowly devolve from a place where thoughtful discussions happened to now just being one of the worst echo chambers on the internet, like a bad subreddit. I've made suggestions over the years in their public feedback surveys to alter their forum software to discourage mob behavior, but they don't seem to be doing anything about it.
They don't actually publish the comments under the article, only a link. I've long suspected sites doing that are fully aware of how shit the comment section is, and try to hide it from casual viewers while keeping the nutjob gallery happy.
Phoronix comes to mind.
This goes back a lot farther with Ars. They done this for years because their comments section is driven by forum software. The main conversations happen in the forums. They are then reformatted for a the comment view.
So, their main goal wasn’t to hide the comments, but push people to forums where there is a better format for conversation.
At least that’s how it used to work.
Most mainstream news sites around here have by now hidden the comment section somehow, either making it folded by default or just moving it to the bottom of the page below "related news" sections and the like.
Hard agree. https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/06/meta-debuts-playstati... is an example I remember. The subject matter of the is not controversial (just another Game Pass like subscription), but the comment section is full of -- yes you've guessed it -- Meta BAD! There is absolutely no meaningful discussion of the service itself.
I mostly stopped paying attention to the comment section after that, and Ars in general.
You see the same sort of thing around here with people complaining about the death of Google Reader on anything that even vaguely mentions Google.
I don't see that.
You know what else I don't see? Google Reader, because Google killed it!
Philosophically I want to agree with you more but Meta is the informational equivalent of RJ Reynolds. They’ve facilitated crime waves (remember all of the hand-wringing about shoplifting which died down when the government went after Facebook marketplace and Amazon?), supported genocide, and elevated some of the worst voices in the world. Giving them more money and social control is a risk which should be discussed.
You're doing it too. Please don't.
I can say that to a certain degree about Hacker News too.
Still often good comments here, but certain topics devolve into a bad subreddit quickly. The ethos of the rules hasn't scaled with the site.
The switch to their newest forum software seems to discourage any kind of actual conversation. If I recall correctly, the last iteration was also unthreaded, but somehow it was easier for a back-and-forth to develop. Now it is basically just reactions-- like YouTube comments (which, ironically, is actually threaded).
Is HN really the last remaining forum for science and technology conversations? If so... very depressing.
lobste.rs is smaller but can have good discussion.
> Is HN really the last remaining forum for science and technology conversations?
Honestly, HN isn’t very good anymore either. The internet is basically all trolling, bots and advertising. Often all at once.
Oh and scams, there’s also scams.
I can only conclude it’s what they want at this point
Try reading Slashdot these days and it's the same story. I stopped reading regularly when cmdrtaco left but still check in occasionally out of misplaced nostalgia or something.. The comment section is like a time capsule from the 00s, the same ideas and arguments have been echoing back and forth there for years, seemingly losing soul and nuance with each echo. Bizarre, and sad.
I'd like to subscribe to your newsletter, you insensitive clod.
They should get rid of the fairly extremely prominent badges of years-on-the-forum and number-of-comments. Maybe that'd help quell some of the echo down, because every comment section on Ars articles is 10+ year old accounts all arguing with each other.
Yea but doing that would decrease engagement and engagement is the only metric that matters! /s
Yeah it's like a rogues' gallery of terminally online midwits over there
The bigger story is the way tech companies sucked the oxygen out of journalism. This started with capturing a growing chunk of ad revenue but then became editorial control as everyone started picking headlines, writing styles, and publication schedules to please the tech companies which control whether they receive 80% of their traffic.
Everyone writes like Buzzfeed now because Twitter and Facebook made that the most profitable; Google/Twitter/Facebook need a constant stream of new links and incentivize publishing rapidly rather than in-depth; and Facebook severely damaged many outfits with the fraudulent pivot to video pretending they’d start paying more.
Many of the problems we see societally stem back to people not paying for media, leaving the information space dominated by the interest of advertisers and a few wealthy people who will pay to promote their viewpoints.
> I think it's difficult for a lot of these bigger publishers to be anything other than access journalism and advertising
Maybe this is exactly the issue? Every news company is driven like a for-profit business that has to grow and has to make the owners more money, maybe this is just fundamentally incompatible with actual good journalism and news?
Feels like there are more and more things that have been run in the typical capitalistic fashion, yet the results always get worse the more they lean into it, not just news but seems widespread in life.
Current response from one of the more senior Ars folk:
https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/journalistic-standards...
(Paraphrasing: Story pulled over potentially breaching content policies, investigating, update after the weekend-ish.)
Look forward to seeing their assessment.
The story is credited to Benj Edwards and Kyle Orland. I've filtered out Edwards from my RSS reader a long time ago, his writing is terrible and extremely AI-enthusiastic. No surprise he's behind an AI-generated story.
Is he even a real person I wonder
He was murdered on a Condé Nast corporate retreat and they have been using an AI in his likeness to write articles ever since!
Would make for a good book, company hires famous writer, trains an ai on them, tortures them to sign over their likeness rights and then murders them. Keeps up appearances of life via video gen, voice gen and writing gen.
Almost the plot of The Congress
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Congress_(2013_film)
Going on my to watch list
> his writing is terrible and extremely AI-enthusiastic
I disagree, his writings are generally quite good. For example, in a recent article [1] on a hostile Gemini distillation attempt, he gives a significant amount of background, including the relevant historical precedent of Alpaca, which almost any other journalist wouldn't even know about.
1: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/02/attackers-prompted-gemini...
Also filtered out the following slop generators from my RSS feed, which significantly enhanced my reading experience:
Jonathan M. Gitlin
Ashley Belanger
Jon Brodkin
I wonder how soon I will be forced to whitelist only a handful of seasoned authors.
> I wonder how soon I will be forced to whitelist only a handful of seasoned authors.
Twenty years ago?
This is fascinating because Ars has probably _the most_ anti-AI readership of the tech publications. If the author did use AI to generate the story (or even help) their will be rioting for sure
The original story for those curious
https://web.archive.org/web/20260213194851/https://arstechni...
This is a bummer. Ars is one of the few news sources I consistently read. I give them money because I use an ad blocker and want to support them.
I have noticed them doing more reporting on reporting. I am sure they are cash strapped like everyone. There are some pretty harsh critics here. I hope they, too are paying customers or allowing ads. Otherwise, they are just pissing into the wind.
Oh my goodness. I hope the Matplotlib maintainer is holding it together, must be terrible for him. It's like being run over by press car after having an accident.
Blog post of the maintainer about the Ars Technica article and other related stuff: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47009949 (492 points | 14 hours ago | 254 comments)
I bet they’ll be taking a break from AI for a while.
I used to go to Ars daily, loved them... but at some point during the last 5 years or so they decided to lean into politics and that's when they lost me. I understand a technology journal will naturally have some overlap with politics, but they don't even try to hide the agenda anymore.
Perhaps it’s because politics have “leaned in” to the topics they cover, like the FCC, NASA, the FDA, and EVs.
I'm curious as to what their agenda is? I don't read it very often but I've not noticed anything overt. Could you give me any examples? I'd love to know more.
_Daily_ hit pieces on Elon Musk (or Musk companies), going for something like a decade. These have petered out somewhat since he left DOGE. But they started way back before he should have had that much notoriety.
They were rightfully been calling out the grift at Tesla. On the SpaceX front they've been his biggest cheerleader (even dismissing other stories like the sexual harrassment)
I got tired of reading about Trump and Elon.
I'm also trying to understand. The agenda is to publish about Trump and Elon? Is that correct?
The agenda is to highlight when Trump and Elon blunder but ignore neutral or positive stories. Go to the front page right now and look at the articles, I see four mentioning Trump that are negatively charged. That isn't to say any one article is untrue, but hard to miss the curated pattern
Honest question: has he done anything you think warrants good press?
I too quickly grew tired of the constant doomerism in his first term, but this one seems to be unmitigatedly terrible.
Apart from articles by the two space reporters, any news about Musk tend to be biased towards being extremely negative.
Aside from SpaceX, has there been any positive news about Musk lately?
"Agenda" has become code for "ideas I don't agree with", used by people who mistakenly believe it (politics) can be compartmentalized from other everyday topics and only trotted out at election time.
I disagree. Agendas are real things. Just because they have one, doesn't mean it is inherently bad or even a disagreeable position... but some people just don't like to be "sold to", regardless of the topic.
I'm afraid both are true. And they often go hand in hand. Often, someone calling out an agenda is doing so to sell theirs. (See also "ideology", which is often treated as a synonym.)
For some people perhaps. For me personally, I find some sites purposefully interject their 'agenda', either left or right into their journalism to the detriment of the piece. You're not going to a get a truely subjective view on things anywhere but some places are skewed to the point that you can't tell if vital information is being witheld or under reported.
This exactly.
Politics on Ars makes me think of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. At some level of the decision making process for the publication you have to suspect that not only is being done just for engagement but also that there's no respect for the audience.
Ars is more complicated - I mean, RFK jr. comes out against vaccines - is that sciency or politics? Both? But ultimately they're just playing to the audience in the worst way.
Why should they? There's no such thing as "unbiased journalism", I prefer those that are more open about their politics than those that are poorly trying to hide it.
They shouldn't. They are free to do whatever they want, I am not judging them. I just don't enjoy it anymore so I no longer visit the site.
I enjoyed Ars Technica and their forums in the early days, until one of their staff members, Peter Bright aka Dr. Pizza was one of the nastiest forum people I’ve encountered. He got away with behavior that would get anyone else banned because he was staff. There was one point when they gave him a temporary ban, which seemed strange to me that they were banning their own employee from their own forums for a while instead of kicking an obvious problem person off of the staff.
They seemed overly protective of their own even in the face of obvious bad behavior.
That same person was later arrested for enticing minors in a very disgusting case https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/former-journalist-convi...
It’s a site I want to like, but they have a history of protecting their own above all else. If they try to wash this story away as a mistake or error and let the writer stay then I wouldn’t be surprised at all.
I use AI in my work too but this would be akin to vibe coding, no test coverage, straight to prod. AI aside, this is just unprofessional.
archive of the deleted article https://mttaggart.neocities.org/ars-whoopsie
Already being discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47009949
This error by Ars is a whole new layer on top of that story.
Look again, that post already includes the Ars story (near the top).
It’s extremely generous to call deliberate slop generation an error.
I'm honestly shocked by this having been an Ars reader for over ten years. I miss the days when they would publish super in-depth articles on computing. Since the Conde Nast acquisition I basically only go to ars for Beth Mole's coverage which is still top notch. Other than that I've found that the Verge fulfills the need that I used to get from Ars. I also support the Verge as a paid subscriber and cannot recommend them enough.
There are some interesting dynamics going on at Ars. I get the sense that the first author on the pulled article, Benj Edwards, is trying to walk a very fine line between unbiased reporting, personal biases, and pandering to the biases of the audience -- potentially for engagement. I get the sense this represents a lot of the views of the entire publication on AI. In fact, there are some data points in this very thread.
For one, the commenters on Ars largely, extremely vocally anti-AI as pointed out by this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47015359 -- I'd say they're even more anti-AI than most HN threads.
So every time he says anything remotely positive about AI, the comments light up. In fact there's a comment in this very thread accusing him of being too pro-AI! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47013747 But go look at his work: anything positive about AI is always couched in much longer refrains about the risks of AI.
As an example, there has been a concrete instance of pandering where he posted a somewhat balanced article about AI-assisted coding, and the very first comment went like, "Hey did you forget about your own report about how the METR study found AI actually slowed developers down?" and he immediately updated the article to mention that study. (That study's come up a bunch of times but somehow, he's never mentioned the multiple other studies that show a much more positive impact from AI.)
So this fiasco, which has to be AI hallucinations somehow, in that environment is extremely weird.
As a total aside, in the most hilarious form of irony, their interview about Enshittification with Cory Doctorow himself crashed the browser on my car and my iPad multiple times because of ads. I kid you not. I ranted about it on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/kunalkandekar_enshittificatio...
This is what happens when you optimize for publishing speed over accuracy. But the deeper issue is attribution — if Ars fabricated quotes, how many other outlets are doing the same with less prominent maintainers who won't notice? Open source maintainers already deal with enough burnout without having words put in their mouths.
Ars still has some of the best comment sections out there. It's refreshing to hang with intelligent, funny people - just like the good old days on the Web.
I am finding less value in reading Ars:
* They are often late in reporting a story. This is fine for what Ars is, but that means by the time they publish a story, I have likely read the reporting and analysis elsewhere already, and whatever Ars has to say is stale
* There seem to be fewer long stories/deep investigations recently when competitors are doing more (e.g. Verge's brilliant reporting on Supernatural recently)
* The comment section is absolutely abysmal and rarely provides any value or insight. It maybe one of the worst echo chambers that is not 4chan or a subreddit, full of (one-sided) rants and whining without anything constructive that is often off topic. I already know what people will be saying there without opening the comment section, and I'm almost always correct. If the story has the word "Meta" anywhere in the article, you can be sure someone will say "Meta bad" in the comment, even if Meta is not doing anything negative or even controversial in the story. Disagree? Your comment will be downvoted to -100.
These days I just glance over the title, and if there is anything I haven't read about from elsewhere, I'll read the article and be done with it. And I click their articles much less frequently these days. I wonder if I should stop reading it completely.
There are still a few authors worth reading on Ars. Beth Mole has a loyal following for a reason-- her stories are interesting, engaging, and never fail to make me squirm with horror. Jonathan Gitlin has a tendency to drop into the forum to snipe at comments he does not like, and I have no interest in supercars, but by and large his automobile reporting is interesting. And if you like anything rocket related, Eric Berger is clearly passionate about the industry. There are a few other folks who are hit-or-miss like most journalists. I've found that Benj is mostly misses, and although I am always interested in what John Timmer writes about, I cannot seem to interpret his writing style. In general I skip the syndicated articles from Wired, etc, because they are either "nothings" or bad.
Here's a recent Jonathan Gitlin piece that I found particularly egregious: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/01/exclusive-volvo-tells-u...
Absolutely zero discussion of why this might be a bad idea. It's not journalism, it's advertising.
I think Dan Goodin sometimes writes deep analysis of security attacks, although his recent articles len towards surface level news stories that you can find everywhere.
Some companies have enough of a track record that they should be nuked from orbit, and "Company bad" is all that is worth saying. Meta is one of those companies. Palantir is another. Not holding them accountable and acting as if we should continue engaging with their products is part of the reason we are rapidly sliding towards dystopia
They also have a strange obsession with stories about vaccines, rare scary ailments, and child porn. I suppose these topics get them good engagement, but not something I want to read about (constantly) on a tech blog.
The Verge is definitely on the upswing right now. I started a paid subscription to them earlier this year.
the Ars comment section is truly a cesspit, I'm surprised the site seems okay with leaving it like that.
Verge comments aren't much better either. Perhaps this is just the nature of comment sections, it brings out the most extreme people
This is embarrassing :/
Take a look at the number of people who think vibe coding without reading the output is fine if it passes the tests who but are absolutely aghast at this.
"You are responsible for what you ship" is actually a pretty universally agreed-upon principle...
How?
I think you’re imagining that these hypocrites exist.
Does anyone know if DrPizza is still in the clink?
I met him once when we were both in Seattle for a conference, and a group of us went out to eat. He definitely gave off an odd vibe, but at the time I attributed it to the typical not very socially adjusted nerd stuff.
But with the benefit of hindsight his conviction is not really that surprising now. Way back in the day he used to argue about age of consent laws on the forums a lot.
I never met her in person but I only had positive online interactions with his then wife. What a horrible thing for her.
Name: PETER BRIGHT
Register Number: 76309-054
Age: 45
Race: White
Sex: Male
Release Date: 08/11/2028
Located At: FCI Elkton
he liked his thinkpads and uhmm some other stuff
The real PizzaGate.
Nothing new, just got caught this time.
Some of the quotations come from an edited github comment[0]. But some of them do seem to be hallucinations.
[0] https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/pull/31132#issuecom...
et tu ars technica?
Finally time to get rid of them and delete the RSS feed. It was more nostalgia anyways the last 7 years showed a steady decline.
I would like to give a small defense of Benj Edwards. While his coverage on Ars definitely has a positive spin on AI, his comments on social media are much less fawning. Ars is a tech-forward publication, and it is owned by a major corporation. Major corporations have declared LLMs to be the best thing since breathable air, and anyone who pushes back on this view is explicitly threatened with economic destitution via the euphemism "left behind." There's not a lot of paying journalism jobs out there, and people gotta eat, hence the perhaps more positive spin on AI from this author than is justified.
All that said, this article may get me to cancel the Ars subscription that I started in 2010. I've always thought Ars was one of the better tech news publications out there, often publishing critical & informative pieces. They make mistakes, no one is perfect, but this article goes beyond bad journalism into actively creating new misinformation and publishing it as fact on a major website. This is actively harmful behavior and I will not pay for it.
Taking it down is the absolute bare minimum, but if they want me to continue to support them, they need to publish a full explanation of what happened. Who used the tool to generate the false quotes? Was it Benj, Kyle, or some unnamed editor? Why didn't that person verify the information coming out of the tool that is famous for generating false information? How are they going to verify information coming out of the tool in the future? Which previous articles used the tool, and what is their plan to retroactively verify those articles?
I don't really expect them to have any accountability here. Admitting AI is imperfect would result in being "left behind," after all. So I'll probably be canceling my subscription at my next renewal. But maybe they'll surprise me and own up to their responsibility here.
This is also a perfect demonstration of how these AI tools are not ready for prime time, despite what the boosters say. Think about how hard it is for developers to get good quality code out of these things, and we have objective ways to measure correctness. Now imagine how incredibly low quality the journalism we will get from these tools is. In journalism correctness is much less black-and-white and much harder to verify. LLMs are a wildly inappropriate tool for journalists to be using.
I believe you can go ahead and cancel your subscription now and it will only take effect at the next renewal point.
That helps ensure you don't forget, and sends the signal more immediately.
There’s also a free text field for you to say why you’re cancelling.
Looks they're gonna investigate and perhaps post something next week. https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/journalistic-standards...
Yeah, “we just made shit up in an article, destroying trust in our publication, but we will get around to investigating when we have a little free time in the next week or so.”
No, you just shipped the equivalent to a data-destroying bug: it’s all-hands-over-the-holiday-weekend time.
It's the weekend and Monday is a holiday in the US.
Kind of funny that the people trusting AI too much appear to be the ones who will be left behind.
comment on the comments
anybody else notice that the meatverse looks like it's full of groggy humans bumbling around getting there bearings after way too much of the wrong stuff consumed at a party wears off that realy wasn't fun at all. A sort of technological hybernation that has gone on way too long.
Man this is disappointing and really disturbing.