Ask HN: What happened to theregister.com? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What happened to theregister.com?

219 pointsdonpott133 comments

Asking here because I think there is probably a lot of overlap and maybe some knowledgeable insiders.

I used to visit The Register almost every day up until a few years ago. Back then, it was famous for its punny headlines, tongue-in-cheek reporting style, and all in all being a self-identified IT tabloid.

I visited it again a week or two ago, and it seems to have dropped the humourous tone and intentionally-obscure headlines, to become just one more samey IT news page.

Does anybody know what caused this transformation? Has it been acquired by a conglomerate or something? The nearest thing I've found is that its original Chief Editor left in May 2019...

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Hello, I'm Chris Williams, the editor of The Register. Maybe I can answer some of these Qs.

> what caused this transformation?

All things have to evolve and move with the times. As you've said, we were known, for example, for "intentionally-obscure headlines." Guess what, that works for some people - and it was fun - but it was holding us back reaching many more people, not just from the headline tone but also aggregation and sharing. And I want our original, technical, and best coverage seen by as many folks as possible.

The Reg has been going for 20+ years. We have to keep up with what people want. And yes, some people liked the 2010s era, some missed the 2000s era, but also many more thought we weren't taking journalism seriously. We do take it seriously (we don't take ourselves too seriously) and I'd hate for headlines to hold that back.

What's really changed is that we've styled the main headlines to be more accessible in every way, and still keep our sardonic, informed voice in stories and sub-headlines. We have a mix of core IT stories; software and open source; where life meets tech; science; and more, written in a way that gives our tech readers a voice.

If you haven't read us in a while, then yes, we've changed visibly. If you've been reading us for more than a year or two, the change will have been fairly gradual as we tune our headlines to match what people expect from an irreverent technical title.

> Has it been acquired by a conglomerate?

No, it's still independently owned, with owners who give editorial free rein. It's documented in UK Companies House.

> its original Chief Editor left in May 2019

No, you're thinking of an executive editor who left around then, who wasn't in a management position (think editor-at-large).

The Register used to be for dicks, now it's actually good. So well done Chris!

Now its just for Tom and Harry?

Sure, but also Jane.

I stopped reading it years ago when it started getting gratuitously contrarian. After this reply from Chris I’m going to give it another go now.

> As you've said, we were known, for example, for "intentionally-obscure headlines." Guess what, that works for some people - and it was fun - but it was holding us back reaching many more people, not just from the headline tone but also aggregation and sharing. And I want our original, technical, and best coverage seen by as many folks as possible.

This is like being a curry shop known for having intensely flavorful but spicy curry - thus having dedicated fans who enjoy that flavor - and toning it down in flavor and spice because you want to have more general appeal. Now nobody thinks of you as "that shop with the intense curry" but just one of many curry shops.

Now you're just like every other shitty tech news website and competing for the same generic eyeballs who will read a story from you that happens to appear in google news and never come back.

But it's just the headlines allegedly, not the rest of the writing, at least.

OP literally left despise them having "intense curry".

OP here. I think it's an apt metaphor. To expand/clarify, I would say that the spiciness of the curry was at the same time hard work (ie. having to parse the headlines, for example) and the main reason I went to this restaurant (it made it unique, it was a differentiator). I would visit it occasionally for a treat (or whenever a big event happened in Tech, although I'm mixing my metaphors now), but not as something one does every day.

Another victim of SEO requirements :(

Punny headlines unfortunately are terrible for targeting keywords

You can compensate somewhat in the metadata but you still need to convince people to click and it's very easy to cross the line from clever but clear to punny and obscure. I imagine that if I looked through the current issue of The Economist, I'd find some clever headlines but it would still be pretty clear what the stories were about.

This isn't a new thing. When I was an industry analyst we also liked to do clever stuff in titles which at least one editor pushed back on. However, we were mostly a fully paywalled subscription so it was less of a consideration in our case.

Exactly, that's why s-engine monopolies are bad. People don't see it, but it is a big step towards giving fellatio to a machine. If you want to be unique you will suffer, because the shitty search engine that has monopoly over the market governs what will get a green light and what won't. And as the years pass more and more the faceless, intangible corpo backed machine bullshit will govern our lives.

The problem now is that you take journalism serious and it has just become yet another boring website. A lot of articles also read like advertisements in disguise.

Same thing happened with Engadget and Gizmodo. Used to absolutely love reading them on a daily basis, product reviews were always super technical and a bit off the wall, it had that hackaday-type vibe.

Now they are a spammy lowest-common-denominator pop culture “tech news” and cell phone reviews.

I'm sure you're doing whats best for the organization. The changes took away from what made you unique, fun and independent.

Thank you for responding to this topic, although what you're saying does disappoint me. I've been an on-and-off Reg reader since the Slashdot days, and I loved the style. But, like many UK media outlets in the past few years, there seems to be a push to "globalize" the product - most notably by replacing .co.uk domains with .com, but also in reducing the cynicism and irreverence that used to make UK media worth reading even for people who weren't living in the UK. Nowadays I'm finding it's getting hard to distinguish British outlets from American outlets a lot of the time - presumably because everyone needs to optimize their content to suit the lowest-common-denominator algorithms of US-owned tech giants. I can't really blame you for following suit, but it does contribute to the overall homogenization of the media, in my opinion.

".. like many UK media outlets in the past few years, there seems to be a push to "globalize" the product .. also in reducing the cynicism and irreverence that used to make UK media worth reading even for people who weren't living in the UK."

Isn't this actually a more general cultural shift. On the societal level, or on the level of the entire developed world. It often feels like people are simply tired of cynicism these days.

Being a trained journalist, I have observed something similar in my own country: former witty, extremely-clever-but-cynical outlets have changed to a more neutral style in recent years. I do think this is an obvious win for journalism, or at least for investigative reporting. They can possibly dig a little deeper this way. More focus on the hard work of bringing serious problems to light, less focus on crafting mean headlines.

Also, as a side note, I'd say it is actually much easier to write a "cynical" headline as compared to one that is not mean, but still playful and multi-layered. IMO cynicism is mostly a low-hanging fruit; which is why this is such a common "closet addiction" in many newsrooms.

I have noticed the British spelling of words has disappeared too. Is every writer there murican now?

Noah's revenge, surely.

Every single headline in The New Republic used to be a delightfully clever gem, but at some point in the past two decades, that practice descended into mediocrity alongside the outlet as a whole.

> former witty, extremely-clever-but-cynical outlets have changed to a more neutral style in recent years.

Which is why Private Eye is so popular and has record sales figures!

(Hint: It remains as British and as cynical as ever)

Sounds like Walmart and McDonalds slowly replacing local options.

Spaniard here. Back in the day we had Slashdot (most IT/science educated guys in Spain can at least read English because of obvious requeriments on academia) and a Spanish analogue, Barrapunto (same meaning, slash/bar and punto/dot/point). A literal clone, with quality comments and lots of folks teaching and learning at. Later, a Digg clone appeared, Menéame (lit. "shake me"), a Digg clone to share/aggregate news.

But the sad thing it's Barrapunto is not more since a decade (they plugged the servers down a few years ago) and Meneame took its position, and politic arguments took over the "geeky" environment.

I miss these days, I could learn geeky and tech stuff in both languages and chat with geniouses daily. Reddit did the same for Slashdot, ok, but you kept Slashdot on.

Here, in the Spanish world (not even the whole Hispanic world across th pond) the legacy tech sites are dead, even for the Usenet es.* and esp.* (for latam hiers) . You have Slashdot at least, Ars Technica, Usenet, IRC and even Fido/Dovenet.

Classic missing the punto HN side comment (sorry), but as a británico learning Spanish I thought it would be good to try and learn the Spanish keyboard layout. Barra punto is horribly hard to type. I keep having to switch when I want to run something in CWD. I do appreciate the dedicated jamón key though.

As someone who needs to cycle between multiple languages I fully recommend the use of the "US international" layout in this scenario

I just use the us-acentos-swapctrlcaps layout.

For what it's worth, El Reg is still a daily visit for me (I think I've probably done so, for 20 years), and I've been known to fly in and sprinkle drops of Holy Pee (in the comments section -I don't do any authoring of content), from time to time.

I like that it (still, despite the insinuation) is a RedTop in spirit, and I am generally quite impressed by the technical level of its staff.

I do like that you have given Dabbsy and Simon a good home. Thanks for that.

Just one drop in the ocean of data, but I'm glad you guys are around.

Dabbsy's gone, unfortunately. Not sure what went on there, but I suspect he wasn't "serious" enough. He's still at Autosave is for Wimps though:

https://autosaveisforwimps.substack.com

Aw, that's sad. I enjoyed his SFTW stuff.

All things have to evolve and move with the times.

This makes sense. Somewhere I have an old hacker t-shirt that says Evolve or die that supports the mantra.

If I could make one feature request of ElReg it would be that the system used by your editors puts a hard cap on article descriptions to 80 characters so I do not have to do creative editorializing of the links when I submit them here. At times I find it very difficult to submit a link and have it still make sense.

> but it was holding us back reaching many more people,

Christ mate! Long term El-Reg reader here.

The pure Blightly, homegrown, sarcastic piss taking tone is why I read the Reg, and so do many others. Selling out to some bland US-corporate bullshit WILL loose you readers.

And BTW, can we have the 'Paris' icon back? Please.

Exactly, as a Murcan, how else could I have learned to whinge about trick-cyclists? you know with a setting, ala old.reddit, you could double down and get those things that need getting said out of the way for your neutered newsletter.

I am seeing a parallel here to the article posted yesterday about how everything is measured by engagement: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32765002

As a product, I would think that you would survive by finding a niche and expanding it. But these changes seem to try to compete for engagement rather than serve the niche.

Yes, you expand your business and make more money - but I would also think that the competition would be more fierce as a trade off.

Kind of wish it could be a setting "sarcasm on".

It's also very similar to how by a bands second or third album (after they hit it big) - they end up changing their sound (often sounding like every other band in the process) - because they go on tour and then they tailor their music to what makes the crown react more.

This is so interesting, I used to read The Register back in the mid 2000s. I learned about it by stories posted to /. and later loved the headers, it is what attracted my attention. For one reason or another I stopped reading it and a couple of months ago I stumbled upon an article and remembered I liked it quite a lot.

Now I understand why it has not captured my attention in these last years: I checked the homepage and the titles are pretty vanilla, they don't read tongue in cheek not witty, which is something I liked. Nothing wrong with that, I assume the standard editorial style attracts a broader audience.

Thanks for sharing Chris.

Sounds basically like you were left with:

"To Assimilate or To Differentiate? That is The [Business] Question."

(to misquote another great British writer)

Can you share with us how this is working? Are you indeed seeing a wider audience? I don't visit as much as I used to (I checked just now and wasn't pulled in), but if you're able to better put bread on your tables for the changes, then I get it. I'd be curious if you'd be willing to share any candid observations of what you've seen since drifting these changes in.

> as we tune our headlines to match what people expect from an irreverent technical title.

Except you're not irreverent at all anymore. You're basically Ars and CNET. Why on earth you'd abandon your readership to attract people who already read Ars, and are unlikely to move, is beyond me.

Hi Chris,

OP here. Just wanted to say thanks a million for taking he time and sharing your insightful reply. I don't have any original/interesting points to make, so I'll let the other commenters follow-up.

I think it is good that independent media outlets transition rather than die. I liked the old days better, but I truly admit that ppl like me that came once in a while (mostly to get a totally different view in a very concrete news item) wouldn't pay your bills. For me the the tone was the USP: it signalled clearly independence from the copy and paste rest. Probably today you could achieve sth very similar with a language model, so you were probably wise to abandon it, before all other news site would have looked like yours. Still some how I believe that this could have been the better reality.

I've been a British reader of el Reg for roughly 20 years. Please do remember where you came from and how your brand came to differentiate itself.

You have aggressively used the word "folks" without a license 8)

el Reg has always had a tone and attitude all of its own. Let's face it the forums are pretty functionally crap and yet it sort of works.

Mess with the format at your peril - make the forums/comments work effectively ... that would be nice.

I have no idea why you insist on calling it "the Reg", it's currently "el Reg" due to the Spanish influence unless you can do better ...

Do you remember say "Eadon"? or a Canadian bloke with a decently potty mouth (Trev).

I fully support your change in approach. The Reg was always a solid source of information and opinion but the jokey headlines were, IMHO, often off putting in my later years. You finally graduated out of the frat house!

Just wanted to say thanks for the many chuckles I've had over your knowing tabloidese headline pastiches over the years. Hope they'll continue to make occasional appearances.

Can you bring back Verity Stob? Smartest, funniest IT writing I've ever seen. Right up there with Unix Hater's Handbook

I miss the old El Reg! I sincerely hope you find a balance.

Yelling! Yahoo! Headlines! were always easy to parse and will be missed.

> still keep our sardonic, informed voice in stories and sub-headlines.

That's a shame. I can't stand the smug yet awfully constructed articles. The house style is beyond irritating, and I assumed Andrew orlowski was to blame, but I see he now writes for spiked (enough said) but if the writing style still makes it so hard to read, I'll continue to give it a swerve

Personally I have just discovered the Register this year, and I like them a lot.

I have seen how the old style was, yes it different, but I wouldn't say its a run of the mill IT website.

Its reporting is pretty good, and they have good opinion pieces, like intel optane possible revolution for IT(1), tracking obfuscation by big tech (2) and safari WebKit limiting mobile web (3) articles.

1. https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/01/optane_intel_cancella...

2. https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/23/opinion_column/

3. https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/06/big_techs_big_privacy...

There are other website like InfoWorld, which produced articles like how docker broke in half, however their website is annoying, and in general less focus on FOSS/Linux.

https://www.infoworld.com/article/3632142/how-docker-broke-i...

The reporting is fine. The commenters do my head in tho

Don't worry -- that goes for the writers, too. ;-)

Thank you for including one of my pieces in there!

I agree, El Reg is a shadow of its former self.

There has been a decline in quality with obvious errors caused by poor research or rushed publishing. There has been an increase in sponsored copy, and also a marked hardening of its already notorious Apple bashing.

There have also been a number of occasions where they've simply missed reporting on important topics altogether.

Also on their forums, there has been a decline in quality of contributions. For a while it still used to be worth going to El Reg just to read the forums, but even that is becoming increasingly pointless.

I noticed the change right around the time they stopped having a distinct landing page for "theregister.co.uk", which I preferred because of their slightly more provincial bent, and instead started redirecting everyone, everywhere to "theregister.com".

It's sad, because much of its appeal was precisely how different they were from common IT coverage that was and still is mostly written for non-IT types.

I used to visit it everyday from the early 2000's, but I don't think I have really visited in the last 3-4 years. I can't put a finger on it, but the writing and then subsequently the comments (which were always fun) kinda started falling off.

I still have it in my bookmark bar, but as I still cant get the favicon to load properly in Firefox, I forget to click on it :)

Same here. Used to be a daily for me, then for some reason I dropped it and completely forgot about it until this post. Maybe around the time Digg imploded? I'm not sure.

Same. Used to really like some of the old stuff, like Lewis’s, but these days I only visit if an item is linked from here.

Ah, Lewis’ old diatribes about how climate change was trash.

Example of the previous editorial style: https://web.archive.org/web/20190410065314/https://www.there...

That's a real contrast. The current site is a shadow of its former self. The new stuff doesn't even seem to be paid-for placement - just lame outsourced copy.

Everything, good or bad, regresses to the mean.

Bean counters have taken over. Ad in front of geek = $1 / 1000 impression. Ad in front of CTO = $10 / 1000 impressions. Then milk the cow, get the investment back and move on.

Anyway

https://www.theonion.com/

https://www.betootaadvocate.com/

Hopefully http://n-gate.com/ gets going again. (Type out the url, he detects HN redirects).

> Type out the url, he detects HN redirects

referer actually

Thanks… referer is what I really meant

An actual example of the previous editorial style: https://web.archive.org/web/20050428082501/http://www.thereg...

Bland tabloid then, and bland tabloid now. What changed?

I really don't see much of a difference

I don't know... for me, who read it in the mid 2000s it was kind of like reading the "Big Issue" or the "Metro" in the UK: Sometimes I wanted to read low thinking tabloid funny news. The Register was great for that. Nowadays it is Yet Another Technology Website.

From the link:

"Rust never sleeps: C++-alike language tops Stack Overflow survey for fourth year in a row"

The tongue was a bit more in cheek before I guess

Mike Magee was co founder of the Register and established its style. He left in 2001, and the Register has been declining ever since.

Declining since 2001! That must be such a glacial decline

I believe he then started the inquirer.net which ran for another decade.

I remember them occasionally featuring a fragment of a poem by Alexander Pope:

  "Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer,
  And without sneering, teach the rest to sneer."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damning_with_faint_praise

To see this gloriously realised, check out CGP Grey's description of Pope's feud with Thomas Hearne. Linking the full video because it's a masterpiece

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEV9qoup2mQ

By some strange coincidence, I had decided this week to read Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's and then watch the film again.

I might also repeat a famous Wilde quote:

There are two ways to dislike poetry. One is to dislike it, and the other is to read Pope.

I really felt that when Larry the janitor left in 1998 is when the decline started.

I miss Larry. Backbone of the org.

Yeap, I agree. I've been reading technological news from El Reg since around 2000 and their writing style has changed a lot, it's not as humorous as it used to be.

Once of the only reasons to visit them nowadays is for the BOFH (new episode every Friday): https://www.theregister.com/offbeat/bofh/

BOFH hasn't been every week since the mid-00s. I wish it were!

Eh, there's only so much of that to be had. At some point, it becomes formulaic.

Verity Stob was my reason for visiting: https://www.theregister.com/Author/Verity-Stob/

Funny enough, I stopped reading the Register after a few attempts because I disliked its headlines and tone. "To each his own" I guess.

You have to see it in the context of British tabloids (mass-readership, low-brow newspapers), especially of the 80s and 90s. The Register was emulating this style of irreverant journalism. For example have a look at some Sun headlines: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/3654446.stm

Yeah, that's exactly why I never really got into the site; I got the joke, it just seemed weirdly awkward and off-putting, like having a coworker who talks like a pirate all day, every day. It's funny at first, but it drives you crazy after a while.

if they do it long and consistently enough i think i would oscillate between finding it funny and driving me crazy

And particularly if you were on the receiving end of a bit of excessive snark you sort of ended up having to talk people down that it's just The Reg being The Reg. And, of course, if you follow that style, you will overdo it not infrequently. I could name a few people on Twitter like that.

It can be funny but it can also get in the way of serious points you want to make.

Funny enough, as a person whose native language is not English, The Register always went above my head. I knew it was meant to be snarky or funny, but it always left me stumbling and I never was quite sure if not the whole page was just an elaborate shitjoke.

As a Brit: Can I suggest this is not because your native language isn't English.... but is beacuse you are unfamiliar with our rather sly sense of humour?

As a non native speaker who has watched everything Monty Python and read everything Adams and Pratchett (in English, i mean they're translatable but it's a HARD job), I loved the old El Reg.

When they changed tone i just thought they got bought out and gave up.

It certainly had an unconventional approach, which was considered a tabloid style (similar to the 'red top' newspapers in the UK, the sun, the mirror etc)

I believe Mike Magee who was one of the founders was responsible for this, and he was involved until he fell out with the direction it was going in the early 2000s, and went on to form The Inquirer, which was a similar publication (although long gone).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Magee_(journalist)

I guess over time The Register has morphed to try and be taken more seriously (in I imagine a rather competitive market), it hides it's original tagline - biting the hand that feeds IT

Not sure, but my theory is that Google SEO had to do with it after Google tried to remove false or misleading headlines around the election and afterwards. At the time (and still somewhat now), satire was/is often quite lost on Google. This presumably hurt ad revenues.

No-longer “biting the hand that feeds IT”.

It still has this slogan in the page footer.

Weirder is what happened to its successor theinquirer.net? It was bought and then erased. Who does that? Was it a copyright thing?

Otherwise theregister hit that brief window between professional magazine publishing and every teenager with a phone becoming a tech blogger, the brief window when website publishing was cheap but not yet overcrowded.

if someone's website was "stealing" traffic from your website, then purchasing the offending site and shutting it down would be business move to eliminate competition.

I think you may be right. TheInquirer's shutdown screen in 2019 mentioned that it started in 2006, when really it started in 2001. So whoever shut it down was either ignorant of how/when it began or they wanted to mislead about the early days.

See here:

https://web.archive.org/web/20200331234933/https://www.thein...

https://i.imgur.com/hqh9aTe.jpg (shutdown screen)

https://web.archive.org/web/20010405023100/http://www.theinq... (2001)

The Register used to be required reading for BOFH. More oriented to folks in the UK, but I used to enjoy this series. If you have some time to kill check out some of the articles.

If we are on the topic, could someone suggest some sites with a similar style and topic?

Infoworld

Also zdnet

Churnalism as an industry is very broken sadly T_T. Advertisers want to see engagement and the easiest way to do that is to suck up to Google SEO and pump more articles on the daily. Original and accurate reporting is expensive to produce. Only the biggest publishers or ones that are well funded can afford to do this. So in order to get the reader's eyeballs and clicks, the guys in the middle and bottom tiers have to crank out news and end up rehashing what has already been broken by bigger orgs. That's why The Register mostly looks like any other mediocre tech site now. I know someone who used to be a reporter and they got tired of having to rewrite stories for little pay.

> Does anybody know what caused this transformation?

Maybe this?

> I used to visit The Register almost every day up until a few years ago.

Years of not going

> I visited it again a week or two ago,

Do you mean that the "old" style didn't make it commercially viable, and the "new" one does?

I would disagree. At least before I would visit it intermittently whenever I remembered it existed. Now I have zero interest in ever visiting it again.

You disagree, but even you admit that the old style was something you rarely, if ever, visited. So, when they try to determine what their users enjoy, what you enjoy won't get counted as much.

> Now I have zero interest in ever visiting it again.

You barely had any interest in visiting in the first place. You don't build a commercially viable product by catering to people who routinely do not use you.

You can disagree, but again, you didn't visit for years at a time, so it doesn't matter.

That's a fair point. I'm finding the thread interesting because it has helped divorce my personal experience from (some of) the english-speaking tech community at large.

For me, a theme that's arising is that the previous style was pretty polarising, but at the same time it was a differentiator. Now, it's neither of those.

It appears that this works better for them commercially, too; so more power to them.

While Vulture Classic's (the old style's) sardonic 'tude was not always implemented well, it was a very welcome alternative to the mainstream's Sisyphean treadmill of "$VendorName $ProductName $NewVersionNumber Is New And Improved Yet Again!". Their 'tude let you at least pretend that their journalists weren't sock puppets for the industry heavyweights, and the headlines certainly made reading the news a bit more fun.

Looking for some upside - Vulture Classic was pretty alcoholic and misogynistic - two features which I found rather unattractive.

In 20 years el Reg has had several, well incarnations is too strong a word, but let's just say its nature has evolved. I think this is is pretty much the nature of any organization. The Lester Haines era (https://www.theregister.com/2016/06/16/lester_haines_obituar... ) was quite good -- I think his presence must have inspired others to creativity and lunacy in their prose. Orlowski was really really good but you can't do the same thing forever.

FWIW, lately I feel like it's been on an uptick.

Let's compare it to google which had a burst of activity and even inspiration at first and then lost its way after Schmidt stopped being CEO. OK, El Reg isn't one of the largest corporations in the world (well, at least they won't admit it and hide it well) but on this dimension I think it's done better than Google.

I still have the vulture t-shirt with the tag line, “Biting the hand that feeds IT!”.

For me the FQDN will always be www.theregister.co.uk.

They had a great formula. Used to get some good scoop, a humorous spin whilst having a decent level of factual accuracy. Sadly, they now need to compete with social media and memes, the newer generations of internet user treat websites as a secondary source of news and entertainment.

So their solution to that shift in their market is to become more stodgy?

Oh, interesting, I might have to start reading it. I used to read it back in the late 90s and early 00s but the tabloid style put me off

(I assume this is the .com is the same as theregister.co.uk -- the place that bought BOFH etc)

It hasn't been the same since around the time Andrew Orlowski left.

The politics (identity and anti-Trump reddit-style) stuff crept in too, especially from its San Fran office, but you could obviously just choose to ignore those articles. It's not something I want from a tech site though.

It's a shame, ElReg and Slashdot used be my go-to site for tech content.

Huh. Never heard of There Gister.com before

Maybe you'd recognize the original domain, There Gister.co.uk?

Ahh a that's probably it

I was never a fan of the Register's IMO smug, smart-alec English IT guy "voice".

There's so much American-centric content in the anglo internet that literally anything else is most welcome

Theguardian and bbc also redirect me to their US .com these days when I explicitly go to their .co.uk looking for news tailored to the UK because of my geoip.

It probably certainly doesn't help that they hire editors that feel the need to compare people's chosen professional names to mercenary groups.

When I saw this, I thought "probably about the changing of the header to black instead of red" (presumably due to Queen Elizabeth's death?).

Didn't they make some grand announcement about shutting down a few years ago?

I can see how someone might not allow that to happen and then just milk the thing.

You're probably thinking of TheInquirer.net, which was founded by a co-founder of The Register, and shut down in the past few years.

Sad to see it turn this way.

Now if we want to tounge-in-cheek tech humour, we are left with. . . techdirt.com?

SEO happened

At least they've dropped that fuckwit Andrew Orlowski.

What happened to ZDNEt is the question isn't it?

Those punny headlines have been annoying me.

Andrew Orlowski! He writes for the Daily Telegraph, which is the UKs equivalent of Fox News. Everything is uphill from there

The Sun is the UK equivalent of Fox News.

You've never the Telegraph

The Telegraph is nothing like Fox News, except insofar as it is a center-right publication. The tone, quality, and perspective are utterly different.

The Telegraph is more like the Wall Street Journal, yet another Murdoch-owned media property.

The Daily Express is like Fox News.

digg dot com, metafilter dot com, reddit dot com, craigslist dot com - all still around but I no longer go to them because they have changed so much.

Fark still feels about the same

It’s not 2006 anymore

Sadly, no it is not.

It is like reading articles made by language model.

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