Comment by Sesse__
1 year ago
Extremely sad. There basically is nothing like Anandtech; the depth, the ability to explain, the lack of sensationalism, and the integrity in benchmarking (I still vividly remember when they noticed an issue with HPET in Windows affecting their benchmarks, and promptly pulled all of them offline until they could reassess). Chips and Cheese is great but only covers a certain segment of it.
In the end, I would assume it just boiled down to lack of money. There were people among us who would gladly pay for this kind of coverage, but Anandtech said at some point they had considered it and couldn't find a good model. (As an aside, I pay for LWN, and I would pay for something that covered similar areas to Phoronix but actually was good.)
From TFA:
> If anything, the need has increased as social media and changing advertising landscapes have made shallow, sensationalistic reporting all the more lucrative.
And your comment:
> There were people among us who would gladly pay for this kind of coverage
It's Friday so I'm going to be optimistic. I'd like to think (maybe fantasise) that we've passed the low point of ad-fuelled, sensational, information-light, polarised, vacuous content. There are some promising shoots, from paid newsletters (e.g. stratechery plus [0]) to search (e.g. Kagi [1]). There are early signs that Browsers are coming back as a topic with Chrome's inexorable slide into increasingly obfuscated ways to slurp data [2] and the (very) early promise of e.g. ladybird [3] as the first genuinely new, ground-up browser for years.
It's never going to be mainstream. As someone once wrote here, the economy is a machine that incessantly drives cost down. Orthodoxy says you can't get cheaper than free - but that presumes measuring cost solely in monetary terms. Widen the definition of "cost" though and what we have now is definitely not free: we pay with loss of privacy, social disfunction and mental health degradation among others.
Challenging the commercial behemoths who benefit from the "free internet" myth is a massive task. Perhaps unassailable. If there's an upside, it's that the long tail - where quality, paid for content and services might thrive - is simultaneously meaningful enough to support a small but thriving industry, and small enough to be uninteresting to the 1000lb gorillas.
That may be fantasy per above. But I'd rather cling to something hopeful.
[0] https://ladybird.org/
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EDIT: fixed grammar.
> we've passed the low point of ad-fuelled, sensational, information-light, polarised, vacuous content
I'm a bit more pessimistic I guess. Netflix at one point felt like the end of piracy, because it was becoming the portal to all great video content. Then everyone wanted a slice of the pie and started their own platform. Now, Netflix is starting to fill up with 'sensational, information-light, polarised, vacuous content' and they really seem to want to become ad-fuelled.
I also dislike that I have to choose between giving up all my privacy to a ton of ad providers or needing 100 different subscriptions to get some good content.
I kinda hope that Mozilla (or someone else) finds a way to become the Spotify/Netflix of the web. A place where I can pay a single fee that then gets distributed between the platforms and sites I visit. But I kinda know that that will never happen, since it gives too much power to that one platform.
For a while I thought that blockchain/crypto might be a good way to fix this. But nobody seems to be building blockchain stuff to do the right thing, they only do it to rip people off.
> needing 100 different subscriptions to get some good content.
Mind this is sort of how it used to work.
Outside of broadcast TV and radio, you either subscribed to everything (newspapers, magazines, newsletters) or you bought them ad hoc one by one at the newsstand.
A problem with modern subscriptions is that they auto renew, and thus can be hard to cancel, and they tend to be quite expensive (everyone wants a “mere” $10/month).
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> or needing 100 different subscriptions to get some good content
Cable still exists. People wanted the ability to sub to whatever they wanted (often leaving out sports for example). That's happened and now people want it all in one place. It turns out what people want is everything in one place for free, which is leading Netflix to have an ad-tier. Though, re-bundling is going to take some time as consolidation happens.
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> Netflix at one point felt like the end of piracy, because it was becoming the portal to all great video content. Then everyone wanted a slice of the pie and started their own platform.
In other words, we got competition. If Netflix remained the sole streaming platform of significance it would be lumped in with the monopoly talk that clouds Google, Amazon, Apple and the other trillion dollar corporations.
If anything this is a good thing, competition happened before Netflix could dominate completely.
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"> we've passed the low point of ad-fuelled, sensational, information-light, polarised, vacuous content"
I am also a bit pessimistic about this, but rather think the danger comes from LLMs making even more convincing clickbait and "facts". Cheap, easy to consume, if there are enough clicks, there is enough ad money.
Something real was misrepresented, so there was a lot of outcry? Awesome, lots of clicks. Lots of money. We can later apoligize, that the LLM summarizing made a misstake there.
As long as ads dominate where the money comes from for newspapers, not much will change.
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Brave is building something that sounds like it might be right up your alley, but adoption of their payment system has been rather low, and I doubt Mozilla has enough street cred to be more successful after the last ten years of their mismanagement and the market share hovering just above 0%.
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> I also dislike that I have to choose between giving up all my privacy to a ton of ad providers or needing 100 different subscriptions to get some good content.
> I kinda hope that Mozilla (or someone else) finds a way to become the Spotify/Netflix of the web. A place where I can pay a single fee that then gets distributed between the platforms and sites I visit. But I kinda know that that will never happen, since it gives too much power to that one platform.
You mean you want... the cable TV bundle again? Literally the thing that the article rails against, because cable TV inherently produces "sensationalism, link baiting, and the path to shallow 10-o'clock-news reporting."
Amazing.
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I think we're past a low point of ad-fueled low-value content. Better alternatives will arise, grow, and become ubiquitous - but then they too will grow more expensive, become corrupted, and be circumvented in turn.
Media, art, and info distribution are never static targets, and even if a stable equilibrium exists and can be reached that does not mean that society will not oscillate around it.
> because it was becoming the portal to all great video content.
Only if your preference of content happens to match what NetFlix offers, which is not the case for many/most people.
> Netflix at one point felt like the end of piracy
I think you have it the wrong way round. Piracy is the solution to Netflix (the bloated, enshittified 'content provider') just like piracy has been the solution to all the centralised media platform monopolies that came before it, that Netflix first disrupted and then joined.
As an individual it's meritorious to pay creators and pay creative collectives (e.g. studios). But it's never meritorious to pay media platforms that act as middle men. They are in the business of ripping off both the creators and their audience ('consumers' in modern parlance). You're only a sucker if you buy into their self-serving moralising narratives. The right and moral thing is to parasite them to death, by piracy. (Or boycott them; also a valid choice.)
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Our economic model encourages this kind of race to the bottom enshitification of everything. Unfortunately there are no high-tech solutions to this problem. The technology we need to improve is our political/economic system.
Perhaps with wealthy country populations projected to fall dramatically we will finally be forced to find a way other than "growth" to value human endeavour. That would be the most likely path to a solution, I fear it will be rather painful.
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I never believed that internet advertising was worth what it supposedly is. Stuff like this seems to confirm it for me: https://www.adexchanger.com/on-tv-and-video/googles-second-w...
I think internet advertising is massively overvalued, the initial bubble happened when the click fraud detection tools were nonexistent, and because Google hasn't been changed, everyone assumes their valuation is right and correct.
internet advertising as a means to sell garbage is overvalued, but it enables a system of pervasive surveillance that allows governments and companies to exploit your data offline too. As long as the tracking continued, the buying and selling of the most intimate details of your life would still be a massive and growing industry even if no one ever put an ad on a webpage again. Advertising is also effective at manipulating public perception/opinion though so it's not going anywhere either way.
People would pay for far more if charged a nominal markup over what their readership is considered worth when subsidized by ads.
But no, when subscribing, they're expected to pay 10x or 100x or 1000x their ad-impression worth.
Subscription aggregation (a Hulu of things to read, like the firm Apple purchased* and made into Apple News+) is one answer.
Another would be a IWP (In-Web Purchase) browser standard like DNT except its an "I'm willing to buy the ad slots on this page at the median CPM" token, coupled to something like the mythical micro-transactions settlement schemes of yore that would now actually be possible on top of systems handling IAP.
* Next Issue aka Texture. I was a subscriber: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texture_(app)
Is it that different once all the additional costs are taken into account? Payment processing / refunds / customer service etc etc that you need when you're taking payments, vs just pasting some Javascript on a page and giving Google your bank account details?
I kind of like the OutsideOnline model where I pay for the apps (trailforks gaiagps) but also get access to decent content. Though I guess that is close to the old cable TV bundle model that sucked.
I pay for Kagi, NextDNS, Youtube to keep ads at bay. If there was a bundled content network beyond just Youtube infomercials posing as content it would be even more appealing.
I've wondered if things might get bad enough to enable a fork of the web. It could happen 2 ways:
1) A truly user focused browser is created, the fabled "user agent". The ad-focused web doesn't support that browser, but websites that care about users do support it. Thus, people who want more than ad-drivel use the niche browser and have access to a web full of weird and non-profit-focused content.
2) Possibly a fork of the underlying technologies. Maybe the browser mentioned uses incompatible technologies or protocols. Maybe this new web is based on something other than HTML and JavaScript.
Probably not. It's a wild idea. It's probably too hard to do better than the existing technologies, and the effort required for such a fork seems ever less likely in this time of dissipating focus and hobbies.
It already exists, it's called Geminispace: https://geminiprotocol.net/
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> Thus, people who want more than ad-drivel use the niche browser and have access to a web full of weird and non-profit-focused content.
This is a technical solution to a non-technical problem. If you want to only access esoteric websites, you can do that today. If you want to block ads and tracking, you can do that today. If you want to only visit websites that don't require ad support, you can do that today.
What you need is a way to pay people for content so they don't need to have ads. Can you solve that problem?
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web3 is that. Pay for content / services you use through micro transactions.
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++++++ to Kagi.
>There were people among us who would gladly pay for this kind of coverage
While strictly true, it almost certainly would only be a tiny fraction. Probably not far off from the small fraction that would visit their site without ad-blocking.
I know people don't like hearing it, but the "I never want to see an advertisement again...and I don't have to" mentality that exists, especially within anandtechs tech minded demographic, does have material downsides.
I'm not saying you shouldn't block ads, but I know 99% of you reading this have never whitelisted a single domain.
Now crucify me for pulling a skeleton out of the closet.
If a site offers a reasonable priced alternative to ads I'll opt for that. I've donated at other times when that option is available.
Otherwise I don't want to be tracked profusely. Ethics is sorely missing in online advertising.
The best (and only) implementation of this I’ve seen is https://all3dp.com/
If you visit with an ad blocker, they say “please disable your blocker or subscribe for $3/year. Hit the subscribe button and you can Apple Pay and be reading a 100% ethically as free article in seconds.
Obviously transaction costs totally suck at prices that low, but one transaction a year helps I’m sure.
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This comment (not from you personally, Asad, but the idea of it) is the very core of the reason why I have such an axe to grind on this topic.
One brings this ugly topic up, that ads keep sites running, and are showered by comments of people saying exactly what you said. Those comments get praise and lots of upvotes. Everyone pats themselves on the back.
But when you are on the other side of the equation, the one dependent on ad views and/or subscriptions, the numbers unequivocally show that people are totally full of shit. That they are just virtue signalling to receive praise and to push the skeleton back in the closet.
Again, not calling you out personally, I believe you do support creators. But I have done this song and dance many many times, and it always goes the same way.
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The article states fairly clearly that they've lost to clickbait (and, I would guess, increasingly, to AI-slop). I.e. it was advertising that defeated them, not the ad blockers.
The fundamentally corrupt business model has grown big enough to reach its own tail and has been happily chomping on it for a while. Now it's getting to the juicy parts.
It's because click-bait is what attracts people who don't have the mind for using ad-blockers. It also attracts advertisers that offer more diverse (and often more malicious but profitable) ads.
I don't use an adblocker because I'm not entitled to the content. If seeing the ads makes the site not worth it I just don't go to that site, these sites won't learn until people stop using them. I've had a lot of people ask me how and honestly the web isn't that bad of you just don't spend all your time on crappy sites.
I'll often ask people with ad blockers what sites they pay for and depressingly often they say they don't pay for any. Coming as no surprise to anyone that has worked with customers before, what people say they'll pay for and what they actually will pay for are very different.
I don't use an adblocker out of entitlement. I use an adblocker because I don't want to be tracked, I don't want to be surveilled, I don't want my information hoarded/sold/leaked, I don't want to be influenced by legions of marketers looking to hijack my monkey brain, I don't want to be scammed by paid ads masquerading as organic content, and I don't want to expose myself to yet another vector for malware.
From a user perspective, ads are all downside, no upside. I pay for my content and I use an adblocker, and that's the only way to survive on the internet these days, because the ruthless pursuit of profit by short-sighted surveillance capitalists has ruined advertising as anything approaching an ethical business model.
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Problem with that approach is that an adblocker is actual critical anti malware software.
I pay for the things I care the most about, but your comment is making the assumption that other people can focus on a small number of high quality sites like you do, and that seems unrealistic with today’s web. I can’t afford enough money to pay to get rid of ads from my life, and I don’t want to limit my browsing to a tiny number of sites and never find anything new.
I don’t feel entitled to any content either. However, ad-driven sites are offering the content for free. I think framing this as not “entitled” to the content is misleading and assumes the point of view of the advertiser rather than the consumer. We know they’d like it if we saw and considered their ads, but we are under no obligation, legal, ethical, or otherwise, to read/watch/listen to ads, none whatsoever. And the content is being offered to you and served regardless of your reception of the ads. They are actually trying to tell you that you are entitled to the content. Content makers want to get paid, but many of them would prefer you consume their content and ignore the ads than not consumer their content.
Unfortunately there is no business model alternative to ads that will keep the web and the economy going. If everyone charged money and stopped servings ads all at once, the web would collapse. Ads aren’t going away, and these sites still won’t learn what you want them to even if we stop using them.
> I'm not saying you shouldn't block ads, but I know 99% of you reading this have never whitelisted a single domain
And I never will. Sites should offer a pay option, not require that their users submit their data to intrusive tracking all over the web. If no one is willing to pay for their stuff, well I'm sorry that they are so bad at creating good content.
I particularly felt Anandtech was a particularly bad example of an advertising supported site because, more than any other site, when I was browsing it in my iPad I would try to click on a link and it seemed almost every time the layout would shift and KA-CHING I’d click on an ad accidentally.
Maybe it is just paranoia, they never asked permission to access the accelerometer, but it happened so consistently I wondered if they had something that would detect the motion that comes before a click and shifted the layout deliberately.
I mean, HN keeps saying commercialism has destroyed the web and anyone who creates content for it should do it for free as a hobby or not at all. So I guess someone here with enough free time and enthusiasm is bound to do just that.
Paid hobbyists, you mean.
In sense that they get paid thru a Patreon/Ko-Fi or something, because these hobbyists likely still want to be compensated.
Exactly, I'm sure these hobbyists will be jumping in any day now to replace what was previously done by paid professionals.
HN user offers to pay $1.99/year for many carefully done review. Amazed that no one want to take deal.
I kept thinking that Anandtech could have survived if they had not been part of a corporate ownership. Because they were owned by a media conglomerate, the pressure is on to behave more like other media business under the same ownership. They could have diversified in terms of revenue if they were independent.
Chips and Cheese is Anandtech's spiritual successor and I think its patron model is probably better overall.
https://chipsandcheese.com/
David Kanter doesn't write articles very much these days, but Real World Tech has always had top-shelf stuff and it's one of the few places where all the comments are worth reading too.
https://www.realworldtech.com/
but how do you explain AnandTech lasting so so long if the business model didn't work?
I remember reading AnandTech >20 years ago. I think it failed now because they slowed down on releasing content. Over the last 2 years they've hardly published anything. They didn't even cover the latest iPhones (and when they did, it was months after release when no one cared anymore).
I feel like something is very wrong when a publication the quality of AnandTech can't figure out a viable business model.
I blame this on Future PLC. Not only their Ad model is worst of all the tech site, the tech layout and software for the site and posting articles were bad and I remember Ian complained about it multiple times. They could have at least focus on their core competency which is in-depth articles and explanations.
Instead we now live in the world of rumours site like WCCftech, and Apple dominance in Tech circle since the iPhone means a lot of new ( relatively speaking ) tech readers are reading Macrumors and 9to5Mac as their tech new sources. Reporting things that those reporter dont understand and keep making fake rumours that makes absolutely no sense.
Very true. As much as we try to hope organizations might reinvent themselves or disrupt themselves for the future before something else does, they just provide a good service.
I can't wonder if AnandTech had a substack angle it might have provided an option?
Good, useful writing that teaches you how to look at, understand, use, or do something is invaluable. Creating beginners is everything in this world so they can progress.
They should start a Substack
Same. Paying for LWN but I get a bit annoyed when there's the lone Phoronix-tier clickbait about diversity amongst all the high quality kernel reports.
Phoronix could get a lot better if it stopped clickbaiting (which attracts the most feebleminded parts of the peanuts nogrammer gallery in the comments) and labelled -> aggregated its benchmarks according to SIMD support/enablement, threading and type (CPU, GPGPU, 3D, etc...). And investigated strange issues in results instead of drowning readers in data.
Basically, we need something in-between Phoronix and ChipsAndCheese for benchmarks.
Also reading Igor's Lab and GamerNexus when I want some data about hardware, but it's Windows focused, sadly.
> And investigated strange issues in results instead of drowning readers in data.
The basic problem of Phoronix is that it doesn't have the capacity nor competence to do this. Journalism is expensive and takes time, and Phoronix is a single person. If they were to actually go in and investigate every strange issue they had in their benchmarks (assuming they even notice them!), or add reasonable commentary beyond the seemingly autogenerated “in benchmark X, device Y seems go be ahead”, they would have to cut the number of articles and benchmarks drastically. Kind of like Anandtech, really; one of my main gripes with it is that there just wasn't _enough_ of it per unit of time.
At this point I suspect if Phoronix suddenly takes a turn and stops being clickbait blogspam, it would be alienating its core audience... People that love to read ragebait and argue aimlessly in the comments.
> Phoronix could get a lot better if it stopped clickbaiting
I've been reading Phoronix for years and I don't recall seeing clickbait. Most of the time the titles are just quotes from the sourced article he links to.
Even skimming https://www.phoronix.com/news I see no clickbait?
Was it something they did in the past? Or is the clickbait specific to benchmarks, which I have no ability to interpret?
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linus-Torvalds-Bcachefs-Regret... clearly fabricating a juicy title by intentionally misinterpreting one of Linus' sentences. Just for the aforementioned peanut gallery watching two egos colliding like they would watch WWE.
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-Split-X.Org-Session reporting about a pretty pointless change just to get that sweet Wayland/X11 drama driven flaming.
Clickbaiting may have been the wrong word, there's not much of that, more "feeding drama to an audience he knows well" than anything. The comment section is almost Wccftech tier, these days.
Diversity as a topic and problem space has became undeniably important though.
Of course it's not an easy topic, does not really lend itself to the usual reporting methodology of LWN. I wholeheartedly agree that many times it is completely counterproductive to post/host content that tries and fails to engage with diversity, because - as you pointed out - even the mention of it gives that ugly sour taste when browsing a site.
Yet the topic won't really lose its salience as long as the problems themselves are either "solved" or something crowds them out.
I trust that the LWN editors are aware of this, and are not doing it for the clicks. So I think it's completely fair (more so necessary for progress) to critique bad takes on diversity, but I think it just leads to frustration to try to "wish it away".
Diversity of opinion and experience is extremely important. Not diversity of your bedroom preferences or any other superficial characteristics that have no relation to technical qualities. Saying otherwise is racist and *ist by definition.
Comments on those articles always go down the shitter. I petitioned the editors to disable commenting on them, and you can do the same -- politely and humbly, of course.
The contact information is on the website, whoever wants to, will find it easily.
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