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Comment by johnzim | Hacker News Reader

I clicked the link after reading just the first 4 words of the title. I didn't see the year it was written until I had closed the link - perhaps it was added after the initial submission.

After reading the article through I was struck by the tone. It was a breath of fresh air - so optimistic and enthusiastic and not in the least bit self-important or unduly serious. It made me excited to read more!

When I saw the '(2009)' flag I suddenly felt a pang of grief. Whatever happened to that infectious, enthusiastic incarnation of wired magazine?

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> Whatever happened to that infectious, enthusiastic incarnation of wired magazine?

I assume it didn’t make money. I have fond memories of reading PC magazines front to back in the 90s but they’re all gone now. The audience has gone online, to a hundred different blogs or YouTube channels or whatever.

Me too. I was using public transport a lot and at one of the train stations there was a bookstore which had lots of different magazines. I bought and read a lot of them. Those where good times. I anticipated the next issues of the magazines and if it was e.g. a computer games magazine I was often hyped for the upcoming games and the demos that where sometimes included.

Now I sometimes still go to such bookstores but those magazines have lost their appeal since I can get all of the information from the internet, sometimes even on the website of the magazine. It's unfortunately also quite overwhelming.

I recently re-started a subscription to paper copies of wired mag. Apparently they just had a chief editor change. It was absurdly cheap, like $5 for a year. I think Conde Nast are just trying to keep some paper subscribers.

Every once in a while the magazines just start appearing at my house without me subscribing. My best guess for that is they want more readers in my zip code to sell ads against.

Same deal. We stopped subscribing to Bon Appetit, moved to a new house, and a year and a half later they started showing up again. Now I just have something new to throw into recycling as soon as it arrives and I can’t get them to stop because I’m not actually a subscriber.

Wired has always been cheap. They'll give it away for free with the tiniest bit of effort.

Wired delivers ads to a market segment with a lot of disposable income. They've got the ability and inclination to buy a lot of luxury goods and services. Wired charges at all only so that you believe that getting it into your house was your idea rather than theirs.

Five bucks is less than they spend on printing and delivering, never mind actual writing. A lot of the writing is pretty poor, though they also have a long history of discovering and promoting some real writing talent.

So it's a pretty good bargain. It just helps to be aware that you're the product more than you are the client.

> Wired charges at all only so that you believe that getting it into your house was your idea rather than theirs.

No, they charge at all because people who pay for print ads pay more based on paid circulation (you get people who pay for ads in free publications, but they pay less), probably on the basis that paid subscribers are likely to actually read the publication it and not just pick it up to use as dropcloths for painting or kindling for fires.

I still have a physical subscription and I will say they do a good job offering content that you can read and it doesn't already feel terribly dated. Yes, often the topics are stuff you'll have browsed over in the last 30 days but the articles are still well written and worth a read (provided you haven't spent too much time on wired.com (I don't)). But the magazine feels so lite now, almost like a special physical edition of their website. The photo of Grimes on the cover recently was nice, maybe they could lean in a bit more on pictorial and photographic content, if it's days aren't already numbered.

> Whatever happened to that infectious, enthusiastic incarnation of wired magazine?

And not just Wired. It seems everything was more optimistic and exciting 10 years before whenever you’re reading this comment.

And so it was, and will be, for perpetuity.

c.f. The Simpsons, SNL, ...

Wired was started in the 1990s, a time that was optimistic even by the standards of your generic "the past was always better" heuristic. It was so optimistic that they actually debated the merits of paying off the US national debt.

https://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/28/business/greenspan-foreca...

In the 1990s, Wired was not merely "infectious and enthusiastic". It was gullibly gung-ho, and ugly as hell. I used a heuristic: if something appeared on the cover of Wired, it was either a fait accompli, or going to fail within a year.

So yeah, 1990s Wired was genuinely different. But often not in a good way.

"Whatever happened to that infectious, enthusiastic incarnation of wired magazine?"

I reckon it was Conde Nast.

Wired’s been owned by Condé Nast since 1998, and wired.com since 2006.

So you're saying in their tenure of ownership they turned it into this?

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