Backchannel Is Moving to Wired | Hacker News Reader

Backchannel Is Moving to Wired

backchannel.com

25 pointsceladevra_10 comments

theringer[1] also decided to leave medium recently which makes me think that they have the exact problem that facebook/myspace had just in reverse. When you visit a site built by medium it is quite obvious due to their styling and format choices. I'm guessing that these media companies want to build a brand and it only hurts them if their white label solution makes them look like everyone else's site.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/30/business/media/the-ringer...

All the commercial sites on Medium are finding new homes since the company abandoned the ad model earlier this year[0]

> Upon further reflection, it’s clear that the broken system is ad-driven media on the internet. It simply doesn’t serve people.

> We decided we needed to take a different — and bolder — approach to this problem. We believe people who write and share ideas should be rewarded on their ability to enlighten and inform, not simply their ability to attract a few seconds of attention.

> So, we are shifting our resources and attention to defining a new model for writers and creators to be rewarded, based on the value they’re creating for people.

It has created an opportunity for other platforms to pick up these marquee titles. I thought Medium providing the tech and ads for bloggers was a great idea - but for some reason they decided to abandon it.

[0] https://blog.medium.com/renewing-mediums-focus-98f374a960be

Why would any site trying to turn a profit from its content be on Medium?

It's a great solution if you want to share content to drive traffic to your business that you can convert but it's never been focused on revenue.

Hope it works out better for Backchannel than it did for Ars Technica.

Not familiar; what happened there?

Just checking their current site against Backchannel, the former is snappier and not any worse looking.

If I understand the root comment correctly, here's my 2c.

Ars used to be the premiere tech news website, focused on tech instead of things like society and politics.

After it was acquired by conde Nast (owner of wired) many think there has been a steady drop in quality of writing on that website, and a move away from tech towards political things, similar to Wired.

I'm not sure if I'd attribute the drop in quality to conde Nast or just a general trend in websites getting more popular (e.g. Reddit), but I think it's there.

Edit: missing the last sentence

I recently let my Wired subscription of 13 years lapse because of the politics. Wired use to be about the intersection between tech and society. Now it's bloated with advertising, extremely light on substantive content, and has become way too political.

Gizmodo is the same thing imo. Way too political and too much side commentary

@baobrain pretty much covered it. I would add the prior owners of Ars were accessible and fostered a sense of community. They would participate in the forums and were happy to help answer anybody's questions. And their style of reporting, they really took their topics to heart and didn't think twice about writing 20+ page monster articles if the topic demanded it. And truth. They reported truth, not opinion, which seems to be the site's mainstay at this point. The content-mill sort of ethic is also new.

There are still a couple of authors there who embody the spirit of the old guard, Sean Gallagher and Lee Hutchinson, but they seem increasingly to be marginalized. Their bylines appearing less frequently, and I'm perceiving limitations being imposed on their word counts.

Oh and this is my favorite part. I was dressed down (aka censored) by one of the site admins for calling one of their authors out in comments for basing a story on provable, industry-sourced junk science. In the old days instead of being threatened in secret and told to STFU, one of the admins would have linked my comment to a forum post, where the community would hash it out.

Medium just became Small..:(

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