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

@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.