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.
> 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.
> What places on the internet remains where articles are written by actual experts?
The personal blogs of experts.
Examples? :)
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?
I presume you meant "fantastic," not "fantastical"?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 story subject is not controversial, and it's just another Game Pass like subscription, but the comment section is full of -- yes you 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.
I can only conclude it’s what they want at this point
Yeah it's like a rogues' gallery of terminally online midwits over there
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
> 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.
Is he even a real person I wonder
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.
How?
I think you’re imagining that these hypocrites exist.
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.
The Verge is definitely on the upswing right now. I started a paid subscription to them earlier this year.
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.
archive of the deleted article https://mttaggart.neocities.org/ars-whoopsie
Nothing new, just got caught this time.
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.
This is embarrassing :/
Does anyone know if DrPizza is still in the clink?
Name: PETER BRIGHT
Register Number: 76309-054
Age: 45
Race: White
Sex: Male
Release Date: 08/11/2028
Located At: FCI Elkton
The real PizzaGate.
he liked his thinkpads and uhmm some other stuff
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.