Where did Wired get all the journalistic cred that Cindy seems to be lamenting the loss of?
I've been a reader for years, and it's essentially Maxim for geeks.
Add to that Wired readers are overwhelming male - 75% according to their latest media kit:
http://www.condenastmediakit.com/wir/circulation.cfm
Conde Naste is in the business of making money with Wired, not journalism.
Or is that too cynical?
Wired is a geeky magazine with sensationalist headlines that nevertheless can be interesting most months. Once again, a woman is complaining because a magazine accurately targets its readers (though, even I was put off by the almost desperate obvious baiting with this month's cover).
When I saw the 'boob' cover on TFA, before seeing the blog title, I knew it was going to be a feminist complaining about how misogynist and mean geeks and the geek ecosystem are.
P.S.: Misogyny is the hatred of women. Most geeks love women! Their lack of presence in the IT world is what makes us surprised to find a competent female in our field... there are so few competent IT people anyway, so the cross-section of two minorities is rare.
Yet so few respect them.
Now, do some people think they're just not respecting a newbie's technical opinion but come across as/are actually disrespecting the person? Quite possibly.
But reading that little whine just made me respect "geeks" that much less.
You make it sound like Reddit is a perfect fit for the Condé Nast family.
The Wired issue which was nearly twice as thick as a normal Wired issue, because of the Neal Stephenson's story of the undersea fiber optic cable FLAG, stands out as one of the highlights: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_pr.html
There was a UK edition for a while, which wasn't profitable enough (eventually leading to it being pulled). I bought every issue and read it religiously.
Then, around the height of the first dot-com bubble - it morphed into a different beast, and in my opinion began to distance itself from its original core readership. It seemed that it was gearing itself as a publication for geeks-with-money, and the articles were also distanced from each other by multiple pages of adverts for the kind of luxury-tech products that only the very rich could afford.
I put up with it for a while, it had a kind of aspirational appeal .. but after a while, became very fed-up with the inverse-proportionality of magazine thickness to interestingness.
The style of the journalism has always involved a degree of wide-eyed hyperbole .. but I think this is understandable. For a long time the magazine championed technology's ability to change the world in an exciting and positive way. There weren't many other publications which were seeking to do the same.
I wouldn't consider buying it now.. it's not the same as it was. I've also noticed that the blog has undergone a change - I'm kind of shocked by the poor level of journalism .. I suppose - like much of the web - the wired blog is trying to attract eyeballs. It's sad, but things aren't like they used to be.
Is it any good?
According to sources I can find that actually seem legitimate, we have a toss-up between liposuction and gasp breast enhancement.