AnandTech Farewell
anandtech.com
anandtech.com
I think there's a need for this kind of thing still, if you have a passion for it you should consider reimagining what kind of content could be needed in 2024.
YC seems to like the kind of esoteric knowledge you probably have.
The big thing i see missing from long ago times is a real sense of community and an all in one site ( article , forums etc). They try and some are decent but there just isnt the connection and i dont think that will ever return. I think reddit and the like sucked all that away from sites and the audience is much much broader so i feel they lose some of that “likemidedness” i dunno im just old and cant really relate to the younger “techies” of today.
Since 40 years ago there have been what, 400 million people years of development work done? That is harder to digest, harder to approach, harder to feel you are a part of something unique and exciting or of a small community.
That was my first experience with Linux. That broken-ass computer was what I used when I learned Arduino. I'm now a firmware engineer, writing this comment on my work laptop, which is running Ubuntu.
There was something about discovering tech through dedicated tech sites back then that felt exciting.
Now, any time I find something new it always has a polished marketed feel to it and has none of the secretive clandestine undiscovered power that old tech had.
I guess I am getting old
If you're getting old, then I must be too, because I know your pain. I don't remember the last time I saw new tech(1) that felt like a real novelty to me.
Now that I've been fully in "career mode" for a few years, I have the budget to engage in my hobbies with greater depth than ever before, and that's amazing. Yet, I've found myself going deeper and deeper into the "retro." Old computers, old cameras, old music formats, etc. It's easier to find novelty there.
(1): this is limited to tech. There's great new music that isn't too hard to come by if you can manage to train Spotify's algorithm to give it to you.
Maybe unavoidable, but the level of ads covering the website also made it borderline unreadable...
I would say another key change is things just becoming less modular over time.
Like, the chipset used to be a major factor in choosing your motherboard, but it just doesn't matter anymore. Third-party chipsets are no longer a thing, and there's little difference between first-party chipsets anymore because every CPU has a full integrated northbridge now.
And honestly, today's PCs are powerful enough that there's no point in even bothering to make optimal choices. You could pick mediocre parts for all your stuff and still end up with a beast. It's not like the P4 or Athlon XP days where you'd feel it if you picked a bleh motherboard or something.
I must admit I therefore was only vaguely aware of the site. (During "my time" Tom's Hardware was quite a thing but probably they cater mostly to overclockers and gamers)
Would be nice to see a renaissance of DIY computing though. MacBooks do become a little bit boring :) On the other hand I do run a small homelab by now
I used to be a regular reader of AnandTech since the early 2000s and the delays are what drove me off the site. Specifically when the Nvidia GTX 1080 launched on May 27, 2016. The AnandTech review came out 2 months later on July 20, 2016. [1] I had no problem waiting a whole week, but after that it was getting ridiculous. They just didn't serve their readers.
After I found replacement reviewers, mostly on YouTube, for my in depth reviews, I never went back to regularly visiting AnandTech. Their time had already passed in 2016 as far as I'm concerned. Not only were they delayed, but their reviews weren't even the most in depth any more.
--
[1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/10325/the-nvidia-geforce-gtx-...
I've leaned on Anandtech ever since as a go-to source for understand technical innovation in hardware. Thanks for making everything that much easier to understand.
In the end, I would assume it just boiled down to lack of money. There were people among us who would gladly pay for this kind of coverage, but Anandtech said at some point they had considered it and couldn't find a good model. (As an aside, I pay for LWN, and I would pay for something that covered similar areas to Phoronix but actually was good.)
Phoronix could get a lot better if it stopped clickbaiting (which attracts the most feebleminded parts of the peanuts nogrammer gallery in the comments) and labelled -> aggregated its benchmarks according to SIMD support/enablement, threading and type (CPU, GPGPU, 3D, etc...). And investigated strange issues in results instead of drowning readers in data.
Basically, we need something in-between Phoronix and ChipsAndCheese for benchmarks.
Also reading Igor's Lab and GamerNexus when I want some data about hardware, but it's Windows focused, sadly.
The basic problem of Phoronix is that it doesn't have the capacity nor competence to do this. Journalism is expensive and takes time, and Phoronix is a single person. If they were to actually go in and investigate every strange issue they had in their benchmarks (assuming they even notice them!), or add reasonable commentary beyond the seemingly autogenerated “in benchmark X, device Y seems go be ahead”, they would have to cut the number of articles and benchmarks drastically. Kind of like Anandtech, really; one of my main gripes with it is that there just wasn't _enough_ of it per unit of time.
Of course it's not an easy topic, does not really lend itself to the usual reporting methodology of LWN. I wholeheartedly agree that many times it is completely counterproductive to post/host content that tries and fails to engage with diversity, because - as you pointed out - even the mention of it gives that ugly sour taste when browsing a site.
Yet the topic won't really lose its salience as long as the problems themselves are either "solved" or something crowds them out.
I trust that the LWN editors are aware of this, and are not doing it for the clicks. So I think it's completely fair (more so necessary for progress) to critique bad takes on diversity, but I think it just leads to frustration to try to "wish it away".
Comments on those articles always go down the shitter. I petitioned the editors to disable commenting on them, and you can do the same -- politely and humbly, of course.
The contact information is on the website, whoever wants to, will find it easily.
I've been reading Phoronix for years and I don't recall seeing clickbait. Most of the time the titles are just quotes from the sourced article he links to.
Even skimming https://www.phoronix.com/news I see no clickbait?
Was it something they did in the past? Or is the clickbait specific to benchmarks, which I have no ability to interpret?
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-Split-X.Org-Session reporting about a pretty pointless change just to get that sweet Wayland/X11 drama driven flaming.
Clickbaiting may have been the wrong word, there's not much of that, more "feeding drama to an audience he knows well" than anything. The comment section is almost Wccftech tier, these days.
> If anything, the need has increased as social media and changing advertising landscapes have made shallow, sensationalistic reporting all the more lucrative.
And your comment:
> There were people among us who would gladly pay for this kind of coverage
It's Friday so I'm going to be optimistic. I'd like to think (maybe fantasise) that we've passed the low point of ad-fuelled, sensational, information-light, polarised, vacuous content. There are some promising shoots, from paid newsletters (e.g. stratechery plus [0]) to search (e.g. Kagi [1]). There are early signs that Browsers are coming back as a topic with Chrome's inexorable slide into increasingly obfuscated ways to slurp data [2] and the (very) early promise of e.g. ladybird [3] as the first genuinely new, ground-up browser for years.
It's never going to be mainstream. As someone once wrote here, the economy is a machine that incessantly drives cost down. Orthodoxy says you can't get cheaper than free - but that presumes measuring cost solely in monetary terms. Widen the definition of "cost" though and what we have now is definitely not free: we pay with loss of privacy, social disfunction and mental health degradation among others.
Challenging the commercial behemoths who benefit from the "free internet" myth is a massive task. Perhaps unassailable. If there's an upside, it's that the long tail - where quality, paid for content and services might thrive - is simultaneously meaningful enough to support a small but thriving industry, and small enough to be uninteresting to the 1000lb gorillas.
That may be fantasy per above. But I'd rather cling to something hopeful.
[0] https://stratechery.com/stratechery-plus/
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41391412
--
EDIT: fixed grammar.
I'm a bit more pessimistic I guess. Netflix at one point felt like the end of piracy, because it was becoming the portal to all great video content. Then everyone wanted a slice of the pie and started their own platform. Now, Netflix is starting to fill up with 'sensational, information-light, polarised, vacuous content' and they really seem to want to become ad-fuelled.
I also dislike that I have to choose between giving up all my privacy to a ton of ad providers or needing 100 different subscriptions to get some good content.
I kinda hope that Mozilla (or someone else) finds a way to become the Spotify/Netflix of the web. A place where I can pay a single fee that then gets distributed between the platforms and sites I visit. But I kinda know that that will never happen, since it gives too much power to that one platform.
For a while I thought that blockchain/crypto might be a good way to fix this. But nobody seems to be building blockchain stuff to do the right thing, they only do it to rip people off.
> I kinda hope that Mozilla (or someone else) finds a way to become the Spotify/Netflix of the web. A place where I can pay a single fee that then gets distributed between the platforms and sites I visit. But I kinda know that that will never happen, since it gives too much power to that one platform.
You mean you want... the cable TV bundle again? Literally the thing that the article rails against, because cable TV inherently produces "sensationalism, link baiting, and the path to shallow 10-o'clock-news reporting."
Amazing.
No, that's why I didn't write that. Spotify allows nearly everyone to put their music on the platform. Just this week I listened to some music with <1000 plays that I found in a random video somewhere. I choose what I want to listen to and a part of the fee I pay gets transferred to the creator. I don't need to buy 100 different subscriptions to labels and musicians, it's centralized.
(Yes, I know Spotify isn't perfect and that there are valid criticisms of the platform. I'm not using it as an example of a perfect end goal, I'm using it as an example of the only thing right now that gets somewhat in the neighborhood. And in the industry there are multiple platforms who distribute mostly the same content with only some 'exclusive' releases. Which is what I'd like to see for the web.)
I wrote that paragraph for a reason.
> So actually as a listener of niche music, I am mostly paying for exactly the mainstream artists whose music I am not listening to
That mostly depends on how much you listen. If you listen more than average, your niche band will actually get more than they would've otherwise. At least if I have my brain math correct.
Might be a bit of a cultural difference though. I'm in the Netherlands. TV was never as expensive over here as in the US. We also got spoiled, I guess, because the hits from the US were also on TV over here but the smaller shows weren't, so we'd get the biggest shows from Fox, CBS and Comedy Central on the same channel in some cases. And from what I remember this was <$20 a month.
And when I canceled cable TV I decided to just go cold turkey and do without the occasional sporting event on live TV. So depending upon how you count I'm probably paying less than $50/month for all my video entertainment these days.
It is more of content owner trying to get what they can from different part of the world. There are places in third world where HBO would be $1 / month , same thing in US is like 15-20 dollars. Buyers/local networks can always say this is price local market can pay else they will pirate.
The big draw for me for streaming is not price, it is removal of ads.
Cable still exists. People wanted the ability to sub to whatever they wanted (often leaving out sports for example). That's happened and now people want it all in one place. It turns out what people want is everything in one place for free, which is leading Netflix to have an ad-tier. Though, re-bundling is going to take some time as consolidation happens.
Also, if you're connecting your TV to the internet, that's a "you" problem.
I for one would be perfectly willing to have an option where I could get Westerns for 2 or 3 bucks a month, Action/super heros for 2 or 3 bucks, SciFi for 2 or 3 bucks, Romance/RomCom for a buck. Kids/cartoons for a buck or two etc. And then choose what I want to subscribe to each month. But if you are going to charge me 20 bucks a month, you had better have 20 bucks a month worth of content that I actually want to watch. (and no ads). Oh, and stop making good shows with cliff hanger endings and then canceling them!
As a counter, there is a trend of linear streaming channels increasing in popularity. Lots of people just want to put something on for a bit of time rather than doom scrolling on-demand to find something to put on. There have been times where I've spent the majority of the time I was willing to kill watching something searching for something to watch. Curated channels with content that your interested in is very compelling.
> I for one would be perfectly willing to have an option where
These are definitely out there. I worked on the backed in for something that did this very thing. There was a channel for nothing but old western TV shows. Another channel that was nothing but animal related content. Another that was basically a Hallmark channel with similar content. I never did see what their pricing was though
[1] https://www.mni.com/blog/popular-streaming-services-what-is-...
And I don't want free ad sponsored.
I just want to pay a reasonable (I'll get back to this) price for the things I actually want.
Netflix was OK with me (and I think a number of others) despite being a subscription service not because it was a subscription.
It was OK because it was
- the only option
- reasonably priced
- and had "everything" one wanted
So what is reasonable?
I'd assume that with all the cost savings given the digitalization of the delivery at least it shouldn't be more expensive than renting a physical dvd, although I'd accept if they adjusted a little for inflation.
Nothing is for sale at the Apple TV "Store". You pay for a license to stream a piece of content, that lasts until Apple or the content owner decides to revoke it.
I have a bundle of Downton Abbey that is no longer for sale on iTunes and I can play it, but (for a while, they may have fixed it) at the end of an episode you had to navigate to the next episode by selecting the show and scrolling horizontally through every single episode. Technically possible but very irritating.
(Funny thing: I was watching the show when the switch happened… I watched two or three with the obvious play next episode in series behavior and then it suddenly stopped working… apple support finally told me it seems like it was related to it being taken off in favor of a bundle with the film included.)
Many libraries all over the world have books which have lasted for centuries, far longer than a single person's lifetime. The books I bought as a child can last longer than my own body. That's close enough to "lasting forever" for most practical purposes.
If you want your personal books to last most of your lifetime, then there needs to be a modicum of care taken, which isn't always possible, especially while you're in transit and moving from one place and into another. How many books have been lost that way?
The whole point was someone lamenting digital license may not last forever (though Apple's has, so far) and I'm just reminding everyone that physical media doesn't last forever either.
Anyhow, comparing different paper types you can see, feel, and smell the differences in quality. It starts with good raw materials, recycled low-quality paper will never make high-quality paper. That's because for high-quality paper you want long cellulose fiber in the paper. The longer the fiber the hardier the paper. The less acidic the paper, the better. You add chalk to make paper less acidic. The best paper has very long cellulose fiber and is virtually acid-free. If your paper turns yellow and "brittle" over time it is because of acid.
Now, the paper-surface is treated to create different effects (e.g. glossy, water-resistance). IIRC, that is called "coating". Coats may introduce acid again. Note that untreated paper is rather smooth and yellow-white-ish. To get this recycled, natural, rough look that is en vogue at the moment, you actually have to treat the paper to look like this. From an environmental point of view you would be better of with a smooth white paper. For longevity you want to coat your paper with an acid-free solution.
It is a little bit ironic, but engineering improvements in paper manufacturing allowed us to produce paper with lesser and less raw materials and worse pH values (e.g. industrial mills need far less water for a ton of paper than a century ago). This cheaper paper replaced the cheap paper from before, therefore degrading the paper quality, making modern cheap books less hardy than old cheap books. Cheap paper from 1930 will last a century or longer, cheap paper from 1970 will last maybe 50-60 years under normal storage conditions, ie. in an open bookshelf.
Now, that's only the paper. The printing ink and the binding also play a role in longevity. First, ink adds acid to the process, which is always bad, but depending on the ink type (dye or pigment, fountain pen enthusiasts will know this) the ink itself will fade faster or slower. Ancient inks are all of the pigment variety (or maybe at least those we know of). They have very long staying power. Modern inks are mostly dye and as a rule of thumb add more acid and fade faster. Bindings have little impact on readability, but are of course vital to the survival of the book as a book. A glue binding will degas over time. It becomes hard and breaks in a few decades. When single pages break out of the book you see the cheapest of the cheap bindings. Exposure to heat will accelerate this process, so if you like your glued books, keep them out of the sun.
High-quality books are saddle-stitched and work differently. First of, you do not stitch individual pages but fascicles, a bundle of paper, each paper holding four pages, which are then again stitched together in bigger bundles and finally into the book cover. This requires some forethought in the layout of the book and is very, very expensive. I own an archival hardcover print of _Also sprach Zarathustra_ from 2002, which was sold for about 300 EUR at the time. It was gifted to me for some accomplishment then. That's a book truly in its own league. I own a few other archival hardcover prints, but none this good. But I digress. I wanted to say that with good paper, coating, ink, and proper storage those books have virtually no end of life.
Sorry for the long post, brought up a lot of memories.
Still there is a number of things I cannot buy or rent.
But the content that is so specific it only appeals to 1-10% of people is both the most memorable and also often the content that is basically guaranteed to not hit for 90% of people. So your math on who's going to pay to consume it changes drastically when the ceiling is so much lower, especially when the effective price required is so much higher that it's going to drive even more people away.
So it's a much larger risk pool to hope you'll make your money back with the error bars so much narrower, and businesses being businesses, they go for the bland thing with a lower risk pool 99% of the time, and then wonder why their returns keep shrinking.
I'm confused. A typical streaming service has hundreds or thousands of what would typically be a physical DVD. So how much should they charge?
Also, the vast majority of the cost for most content is in the creation of the content.
I'd say this is provably false based on the popularity of streaming services, specifically the rise of Netflix's streaming service. That is the opposite of free.
Netflix is not offering ad tiers due to a lack of subscribers; they are doing it because there were a handful of quarters where revenue stagnated. This does not mean it was a bad business model; it means they want perpetual growth to satisfy shareholders. Same old story.
The reasons cable was and is bad and was destined to be replaced:
- No ability to unbundle (as you said)
- Messy time-shifting (DVRs, PPV, all that nonsense)
- Complicated and limited setup (proprietary hardware; extra fees for multiple devices; no ability to view on a computer or mobile device)
- Tons of fun trying to cancel
Cable has two real advantages:
- Fast channel switching
- Garbage exclusivity contracts
Streaming doesn't solve exclusivity but it certainly doesn't make it worse. In fact, making it easier to subscribe and cancel makes it significantly better.
When Netflix came out it was effectively free at $10. People want billions worth of content for $10/month. We all do, but that's not sustainable.
No, it doesn't "turn out" that way at all. But if the pirates provide better service for free than the proprietors offer at any price, that can hardly be seen as my problem as a consumer.
For a few brief, shining years, it looked like the media and entertainment industries were starting to understand that. Turned out not to be the case, though.
As for subscribing to Netflix Disney+ Hulu Prime Apple TV HBO peacock nebula discovery+ paramount+ crunchyroll YouTube premium/TV.... I may still download some stuff
Perhaps with wealthy country populations projected to fall dramatically we will finally be forced to find a way other than "growth" to value human endeavour. That would be the most likely path to a solution, I fear it will be rather painful.
(I say this as a happy user of Brave on Android)
Mind this is sort of how it used to work.
Outside of broadcast TV and radio, you either subscribed to everything (newspapers, magazines, newsletters) or you bought them ad hoc one by one at the newsstand.
A problem with modern subscriptions is that they auto renew, and thus can be hard to cancel, and they tend to be quite expensive (everyone wants a “mere” $10/month).
100% This is what is missing. I don't want to subscribe to the New York Times for £90 per year because I only want to read about 5 to 10 NYT articles a year. Why can't I pay £1.50 for 15 articles? That would be about the same as buying a physical copy of a paper from a newsagent; if I buy a physical copy I probably read about that many articles from it before it gets recycled. Instead I either don't read the article I've found to or I try to find it on the internet archive which is really irritating. I would like to read articles in a range of papers; say 3-4 UK broadsheets, occasionally some international papers like the NYT, Le Monde and a couple of trade papers. If I subscribed to 4 UK broadsheet newspapers I would already be paying >£400/year in newspaper subscriptions. Who does this? I can't understand why newspapers can't see that no-one wants to be spending that sort of money and why they can't come up with a better solution. If the problem is card fees on micro transactions why don't they club together and create some kind of patreon type thing that agglomerates transactions together?
Micropayments do not work. They've been tried over and over, but generally speaking, they aren't helpful. Users don't really use them, and they don't actually help the publisher/author long term.
FWIW I've been working on a startup with a different vision, but trying to make news profitable: https://blog.forth.news/a-business-model-for-21st-century-ne...
Most importantly, the cost has to be no more than the site would get for serving that visitor ads.
This is where the break is. On a per content or per month basis, sites want to charge individuals orders of magnitude more than they charge advertisers. No avid reader (those most likely to be happy to pay!) can afford the same footprint of reading that content is happy to give them through ads. And so, content is writing for ads, not readers.
It's self defeating.
. . .
PS. I bookmarked https://www.forth.news/topstories ... it's not how I find / read content, I need much higher density (somewhere between https://upstract.com/ and https://www.techmeme.com/) and if I want a personal feed, there's feedly and its kin, but what I personally do is something like this socially curated discovery except generated by a process something like Yahoo Pipes that scavenges an array of tentacles into the newsosphere. But I see what you're doing there.
This kind of experimentation is awesome. Will come back and see how hard it is to "make it my own". Thanks for sharing your position essay!
That said, this point --
> Most importantly, the cost has to be no more than the site would get for serving that visitor ads.
is the disconnect. The ads aren't providing enough revenue to be self-sufficient. Hence the paywalls.
Most folks never look up from the adwords grind to consider that the whole existing ecosystem is misguided, and something from before might be better.
Excessive rent extraction, and content that targets ad revenue instead of sustained interest, seem to be where most sustainability gets lost. An auction engine at the heart of both these broken models accelerates the enrichment of the rent extractors and the decline of sustainability.
Then, the middle man who sets this up goes all Apple and says they rule the customer experience, they bring all the value, and they're entitled to eat 30% of everything because reasons.
Then, they either become a huge monopoly, like Apple, for as long as they can keep consumers and producers captive, or for some reason (regulation, actual competition) some other huge business gets into it and balkanizes it (like Netflix, which was a “good” middleman for consumers, until 10 other 800lb gorillas got in there, and now it's worse than à la carte cable).
I'm saying all this is built into your platform of choice, both IAP frameworks available on your platform of choice, and browsers available through that platform's distribution of choice, therefore let publishers register with the platforms (or post keys and coordinates in DNS, or whatever), and the platforms distribute that to the publishers.
Google shouldn't even care if they lose a percentage of ad revenue if they get the same percentage of direct subscription. Meanwhile, Apple gets the benefit of pennies per traffic (not a cash flow they are in today) without the tarnish of being for the advertisers instead of the users and creators.
Brave (with BAT) and others have toyed with such models, but they're from the wrong vantage, and the marketplace needs too many legs of the stool built to bootstrap. Leveraging legs that are already there could make this plausible.
Libraries in some larger cities will let you have a guest/out-of-town library card for a fee, which is often far less than the cost of subscribing to the digital content the library offers.
The newspapers are almost all American, with a smattering of Canadian, but there seems to be a ton of British and Australian magazines.
It might be worth checking out to see if what's on offer matches your interests.
Unfortunately, unlike Apple Music, it doesn't have a web client. https://www.apple.com/apple-news/
You want access to multiple large reporting agencies work but want to pay less than a fraction of the non-adjusted 1990s prices. Your better solution has zero way to work financially. Imagine saying 'why do I have to pay for a whole buffet, I only pick from 5-10 of the buffet dishes that I pick and choose as I walk down the line, I don't take something from all of them. I should pay like fifty cents.'
The economics of journalism are constantly misunderstood here. People want thoughtful, insightful, investigative stories of the non-obvious (or so they say) but also do not want to pay for the dead ends that a reporter has to find to get there.
Journalism is more like hard-tech research than SaaS. You don't necessarily know what you're getting into when you start reporting, and getting something of value can take an incredibly long time. The actual writing of an article or shooting of a video is the last part of a long process.
Unlike hard-tech, the result often has a very short shelf-life. It's not going to continuously earn payouts for the reporters/news outlet for more than a couple of weeks (at best) after publication.
Beyond that, others (Blendle, post.news, etc) have tried micropayments and they don't work -- people don't actually want them.
[0]I know it’s not paywall currently but I don’t know how long they will go on like that.
https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/11/post-the-latest-twitter-al...
They've since pivoted because they couldn't make it work.
Hell, bump it up to $2.50/yr for those 15 articles/yr, same price as a single physical edition. GP would probably still be ok with that, and that doesn't seem unreasonable.
I'm not sure what magazines you were buying in the 90s for $6-$8 each, but they were certainly on the high end and not representative of your average newspaper, which were on the order of 35-50¢ at the time. Full-color glossy mags cost a lot more to produce than a newspaper, so I'm sure that's part of it.
This seems to cover most stuff where the transaction value in question is low, e.g. newspapers, single songs, and so on. The UX seems to be inadequate. I'm not privy how my buddy's company is trying to address this, but I guess it is hard to beat a news stand where I drop a few coins and get a newspaper and chewing gum.
> And it is rare that a publisher will know what is good before it is released.
Now try that with e-zines that are full of DRM
Mostly requiring subsidy by billionaires wanting to popularise their weird political views?
NYT adds 210,000 digital subscribers in Q1.
"The company said it had about 10.5 million subscribers overall for its print and digital products at the end of the first quarter, up roughly 8 percent from a year earlier. About 640,000 of those were print subscribers, down about 10 percent from the same period last year. "
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/08/business/media/new-york-t...
(Plus I'm tired of further lining Bezos' pockets, and I very much disagree with some of the current editorial staff.)
I get that real, actually-solid journalism is not cheap to make. But I'm not sure what the solution is when good-enough articles can be had for far cheaper, or free. The good stuff really is a joy to read, but I'm not convinced $120/yr (looks like it's twice that for the NYT?) is worth the price of admission.
Certainly a lot of people do buy and keep these subscriptions, and subscriber counts do seem to be growing (which is genuinely great), but I would wager that far, far, far fewer people today have a newspaper subscription than in the mid-90s. But maybe that's changing; maybe people hate all the sensational, clickbaity, in-your-face ad-supported garbage floating around for free.
I would only hope that as online publications grow their subscriber base, instead of getting greedy, they actually lower their prices, since their marginal per-subscriber cost is near-zero. Given that NYT home delivery prices in 1995 were ~$350/yr, (~$700 in today's dollars), it seems a little absurd that they're charging 35% of that (for digital) when their cost of distribution is a fraction of a percent what it used to be. Presumably the reason behind that is because their subscriber base is much smaller than it used to be?
By your own math, a subscription is 65% cheaper than it once was -- but the reporting is still expensive. Try outfitting a team to go into a war zone, or maintain bureaus, etc.
The problem is that the "good enough" free articles are usually just rewrites of the ones from the people who did the reporting.
> The problem is that the "good enough" free articles are usually just rewrites of the ones from the people who did the reporting.
> Plus I'm tired of further lining Bezos' pockets
I am also a bit pessimistic about this, but rather think the danger comes from LLMs making even more convincing clickbait and "facts". Cheap, easy to consume, if there are enough clicks, there is enough ad money.
Something real was misrepresented, so there was a lot of outcry? Awesome, lots of clicks. Lots of money. We can later apoligize, that the LLM summarizing made a misstake there.
As long as ads dominate where the money comes from for newspapers, not much will change.
Maybe not, but I hope so.
But yes, I also hope some good will come out of it and intent to stay in the good areas.
In other words, we got competition. If Netflix remained the sole streaming platform of significance it would be lumped in with the monopoly talk that clouds Google, Amazon, Apple and the other trillion dollar corporations.
If anything this is a good thing, competition happened before Netflix could dominate completely.
Spotify, Google, Amazon, Apple, Tidal all manage to have almost comprehensive music catalogs for me to stream. It's rare that I find something on one platform that isn't on another (Some artist exceptions exist, and are rare).
Pick 10 random films off the AFI top 100 list and tell me how to stream them. How many services do I need to watch them "for free".
Consumers want a single point of access to content. If I want to listen to a song I go to my music platform, if I want to watch content I go to the web to find out who has it... That friction is what consumers dont want or need.
You can tell that's the case because practically every piece of music created has been put on youtube while nobody puts tv/movies on youtube for free.
So your spotify equivalent for tv/movies is going to cost $100+ a month, perhaps more because tv/movies are that much more expensive to make and that's what you were paying for cable back in the day.
But people think everything could cost $20 at most, so that's why we're going to have 10 or so streaming services and frankly that's way better than the old cable days.
Legislatures could bring in a compulsory licensing scheme for movies similar to BMI and ASCAP.
Now they don't.
There are movies that "don't make money" because of shady accounting practices.
And I paid 100 bucks for cable for the same reason that you pay 100 bucks for internet now, lack of competition.
> while nobody puts tv/movies on youtube for free
There are plenty of people creating content on YouTube for what YouTube is willing to give them... and that isn't much. They have a working model because they keep creating content, not trying to squeeze every drop from the juice (over and over).
You might want to go back and look at the Paramount Decree. We would not be here if it was extended to streaming rather than allowed to expire.
> music costs barely anything to create
In practice, of course, monopolies under capitalism exist specifically to exploit it, making things far worse for customers in the long run.
Steam is, to me, the closest we have to a benevolent monopoly. A monopoly that exists purely because it offers the best product.
I've heard people on this site argue that Apple has a monopoly on smartphones because they don't like Android and so their only choice is iPhone and since Apple controls iPhone 100% it's therefore a monopoly.
In the context of smartphones, the vertical integrations don't help with the "monopoly" perception, either. Once you've decided to get an iPhone hardware device, your only choice is to use the Apple app store, and if you want something out of the Apple app store, your only choice is to get an iPhone. Android phones are a little more lenient in that there are at least multiple app stores, but you still have the tight coupling between the hardware and the OS despite smartphones fundamentally being ARM devices with touchscreens.
Were smartphones more like PCs, you could buy an iPhone and put Android on it, then use any of the iOS, Google Play, or Amazon stores to install apps. Or, perhaps you'd prefer to buy a Samsung Galaxy S24 and put iOS on it, and install apps from any of the many app stores just the same.
I'd be at least as irritated with the PC market if I had to buy a Dell PC to access Steam and it only allowed installing from Steam, an HP PC was linked 1:1 with the Epic store, Alienware PCs were linked 1:1 with the Origin store, etc. and building your own machine was no longer possible, though at least you'd still have more options than with phones.
It's never been like that. What you wrote is fundamentally the same idea as: "If consumer computers more like consumer computers, you could buy a MacBook Pro and run RedHat Linux on it, then run any of the macOS applications or Linux applications that exist in the world."
While the mobile computing ecosystem and details are quite different, it's mostly same cocktail of things: Commercial hardware that is either open or closed, a [maybe commercial] OS, and applications that execute under version X of the OS and version Y of a runtime.
This "competition" increased prices, which is not the desired result from competition. The problem is that copyright holders have too much power over their content, especially older content. If copyright holders were required to license content to anyone who wished to publish or redistribute it after, say, 10 years of initial publishing, that would be a form of competition that would decrease prices.
That would have happened anyway.
The only reason early Netflix was so cheap was because they negotiated streaming access to large swathes of content, because the rights holders thought licensing for streaming was worthless and leased them for a pittance.
That sweetheart deal was never going to last past Netflix's original gen contract expirations.
It's a HUGE fuckin shame that American Broadcasting Companies, Inc. v. Aereo, Inc. was decided the way it was. Otherwise, Netflix could get out of the stranglehold that the movie studios surely have it in by buying DVDs and either mailing them or streaming their contents to subscribers. [0]
[0] The implication here is that the movie studios are threatening to refuse to renew streaming licenses for their movies if Netflix goes back to mailing DVDs at scale. If Netflix could format-shift those DVDs in real time with a one-customer-per-DVD setup, not only would Netflix have some leverage, they wouldn't be beholden to arbitrary and capricious licensing agreements at all.
Exclusive licencing is the problem, giving a 'monopoly' of sorts on streaming particular content. If everything was available everywhere, they just paid pay per view royalties say, then we'd have proper competition on pricing models & the quality of service provided.
If steam went public and had the usual revolving door of MBA CEOs keen to "maximize efficiencies", you can bet that Steam would turn just as malign as the adtech industry.
A private company is not a corporate raider.
A private founder-owner-CEO combination (like Steam) might be the least vulnerable organization to many of those ills, short of a cooperative (not sure it counts as private ownership).
GoG exists too, and just like what happened with streaming services, gaming companies have pushed out their own shitty platforms full of DRM and spying. Steam is still #1 though.
The last game I bought that wasn't on steam was probably Kerbal Space Program, in ~2014, and later converted my key to Steam when the option presented itself.
*Epic offers 0% cut for the first year to most indie games
No, we got fragmentation. If we had competition I could pay netflix to watch the same content that I could otherwise watch on hulu if I made the choice to pay hulu instead.
Since everyone has their own exclusive content paywalled off behind their own services, we're stuck with lot of tiny monopolies.
That's why prices are skyrocketing, and we have a bunch of examples of shitty/infuriating interfaces that get in the way of users and prevent them from what they want, instead of a battle between streaming services to offer the best/most features users want at the lowest prices.
Media, art, and info distribution are never static targets, and even if a stable equilibrium exists and can be reached that does not mean that society will not oscillate around it.
I think you have it the wrong way round. Piracy is the solution to Netflix (the bloated, enshittified 'content provider') just like piracy has been the solution to all the centralised media platform monopolies that came before it, that Netflix first disrupted and then joined.
As an individual it's meritorious to pay creators and pay creative collectives (e.g. studios). But it's never meritorious to pay media platforms that act as middle men. They are in the business of ripping off both the creators and their audience ('consumers' in modern parlance). You're only a sucker if you buy into their self-serving moralising narratives. The right and moral thing is to parasite them to death, by piracy. (Or boycott them; also a valid choice.)
Only if your preference of content happens to match what NetFlix offers, which is not the case for many/most people.
1) A truly user focused browser is created, the fabled "user agent". The ad-focused web doesn't support that browser, but websites that care about users do support it. Thus, people who want more than ad-drivel use the niche browser and have access to a web full of weird and non-profit-focused content.
2) Possibly a fork of the underlying technologies. Maybe the browser mentioned uses incompatible technologies or protocols. Maybe this new web is based on something other than HTML and JavaScript.
Probably not. It's a wild idea. It's probably too hard to do better than the existing technologies, and the effort required for such a fork seems ever less likely in this time of dissipating focus and hobbies.
Web3 is things like json-ld and the like and it is tragic that scammers have been able to abuse the term for so long.
But together with other, similar technologies it extends the current with metadata etc web just like web2 extended the existing web with things like ajax interactions, drag and drop and folksonomies ("tags") and other forms of user generated content.
The (IMO) fake crypto peddler "web3" is (again IMO) "revolutionary" unlike web2 and the real web3: it is a complete break from many of the things that made the web great. I'd even hesitate to describe much of it as web at all.
Get your head out of your asses guys. There's nothing inherently bad about blockchain or decentralization.
This is a technical solution to a non-technical problem. If you want to only access esoteric websites, you can do that today. If you want to block ads and tracking, you can do that today. If you want to only visit websites that don't require ad support, you can do that today.
What you need is a way to pay people for content so they don't need to have ads. Can you solve that problem?
I think internet advertising is massively overvalued, the initial bubble happened when the click fraud detection tools were nonexistent, and because Google hasn't been changed, everyone assumes their valuation is right and correct.
I pay for Kagi, NextDNS, Youtube to keep ads at bay. If there was a bundled content network beyond just Youtube infomercials posing as content it would be even more appealing.
But no, when subscribing, they're expected to pay 10x or 100x or 1000x their ad-impression worth.
Subscription aggregation (a Hulu of things to read, like the firm Apple purchased* and made into Apple News+) is one answer.
Another would be a IWP (In-Web Purchase) browser standard like DNT except its an "I'm willing to buy the ad slots on this page at the median CPM" token, coupled to something like the mythical micro-transactions settlement schemes of yore that would now actually be possible on top of systems handling IAP.
* Next Issue aka Texture. I was a subscriber: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texture_(app)
While strictly true, it almost certainly would only be a tiny fraction. Probably not far off from the small fraction that would visit their site without ad-blocking.
I know people don't like hearing it, but the "I never want to see an advertisement again...and I don't have to" mentality that exists, especially within anandtechs tech minded demographic, does have material downsides.
I'm not saying you shouldn't block ads, but I know 99% of you reading this have never whitelisted a single domain.
Now crucify me for pulling a skeleton out of the closet.
Otherwise I don't want to be tracked profusely. Ethics is sorely missing in online advertising.
One brings this ugly topic up, that ads keep sites running, and are showered by comments of people saying exactly what you said. Those comments get praise and lots of upvotes. Everyone pats themselves on the back.
But when you are on the other side of the equation, the one dependent on ad views and/or subscriptions, the numbers unequivocally show that people are totally full of shit. That they are just virtue signalling to receive praise and to push the skeleton back in the closet.
Again, not calling you out personally, I believe you do support creators. But I have done this song and dance many many times, and it always goes the same way.
I still have a few subscriptions, especially if they send it out on a dead tree, but with the nature of the internet it's hazardous to not use an ad blocker. I've come to appreciate when publications run reminders that they are, in fact, also people who need to eat, and i try to make up for what i take from the trough by buying swag or sending a check if they take donations. But i get that there's not an enviable business plan on the other side of that equation. It's an ongoing evolution.
I'd place the shift happening earlier with early web portals. People made (or were coerced by their ISP) web portals their home page. The model of portals was show people headlines with direct links to the articles.
Hyperlinks are fundamental to the web so it's not like portals were doing something bad. It is just a model that's difficult to monetize for the destination site. More difficult than a traditional magazine or newspaper since the site only gets paid per actual impression vs paid per square inch from potential impressions estimated by circulation.
RSS readers were more about the democratization of portals since a site feed let the end user build their own "portal" from their collection of feeds. In terms of traffic patterns an RSS user was pretty similar to a web portal user, just a visitor that dropped in on some deep link and didn't necessarily hit any additional pages.
What numbers?
Where can I pay to replace ads with something that isn't orders of magnitude more expensive? Basically any single-site subscription I've seen fails that test. If you're citing that kind of subscription, then that evidence doesn't work here.
For every thing else I use adblockers.
In any marketing research it is well-known that what people say they would pay for and what they actually pay for are two different things. Hence also the mantra about MVPs and going to market as soon as possible.
But specifically on AnandTech and "written journalism", I think they are right about the "written" part. These days the topic and hardware reviews are all over Youtube.
I pay for many many subscriptions for content I like. Also, I don't see any "virtue signalling" anywhere. I don't want ads because they are hostile and not in my best interest. They significantly lower the quality of my life. It's as simple as that.
Everyone says they pay to support, very few people actually do.
Just look at how it is a matter of course to post an archive.is link anytime a pay walled article is posted. It's so pervasive and wide spread that people don't even think about it.
Ad based businesses are as bad as door to door life insurance scammers, multi level scammers, etc.
In short, find a job that doesn't require damaging other people.
/Forgot to mention, watching ads without buying the advertised product simply decreases ad yield over time and therefore it even wastes productivity for 0 return in the long run./
Meanwhile the numbers show where the users actually are. I pay for YouTube, Telegram, and Nebula, self host Matrix, use and run Bluesky infrastructure, and a few other things but I'm the first to admit I'm in the minority. Not only that but it's time consuming! Meanwhile in tech discourse everyone is using Kagi for everything and "it's a breath of fresh air" or whatever.
If you visit with an ad blocker, they say “please disable your blocker or subscribe for $3/year. Hit the subscribe button and you can Apple Pay and be reading a 100% ethically as free article in seconds.
Obviously transaction costs totally suck at prices that low, but one transaction a year helps I’m sure.
There are lots of sites (AnandTech being a prime example) I don't visit often enough to justify the usual monthly subscription cost.
Per-article pricing with no registration would be ideal (yet another cryptocurrency use case that never materialized) but as you say, transaction fees make that a non starter.
I don't really have a better idea besides automated micropayments, which nobody has managed yet, crypto doesn't count,, so I guess we'll have to live with the current situation?
In sense that they get paid thru a Patreon/Ko-Fi or something, because these hobbyists likely still want to be compensated.
Maybe it is just paranoia, they never asked permission to access the accelerometer, but it happened so consistently I wondered if they had something that would detect the motion that comes before a click and shifted the layout deliberately.
I'll often ask people with ad blockers what sites they pay for and depressingly often they say they don't pay for any. Coming as no surprise to anyone that has worked with customers before, what people say they'll pay for and what they actually will pay for are very different.
From a user perspective, ads are all downside, no upside. I pay for my content and I use an adblocker, and that's the only way to survive on the internet these days, because the ruthless pursuit of profit by short-sighted surveillance capitalists has ruined advertising as anything approaching an ethical business model.
I don’t feel entitled to any content either. However, ad-driven sites are offering the content for free. I think framing this as not “entitled” to the content is misleading and assumes the point of view of the advertiser rather than the consumer. We know they’d like it if we saw and considered their ads, but we are under no obligation, legal, ethical, or otherwise, to read/watch/listen to ads, none whatsoever. And the content is being offered to you and served regardless of your reception of the ads. They are actually trying to tell you that you are entitled to the content. Content makers want to get paid, but many of them would prefer you consume their content and ignore the ads than not consumer their content.
Unfortunately there is no business model alternative to ads that will keep the web and the economy going. If everyone charged money and stopped servings ads all at once, the web would collapse. Ads aren’t going away, and these sites still won’t learn what you want them to even if we stop using them.
The fundamentally corrupt business model has grown big enough to reach its own tail and has been happily chomping on it for a while. Now it's getting to the juicy parts.
And I never will. Sites should offer a pay option, not require that their users submit their data to intrusive tracking all over the web. If no one is willing to pay for their stuff, well I'm sorry that they are so bad at creating good content.
I remember reading AnandTech >20 years ago. I think it failed now because they slowed down on releasing content. Over the last 2 years they've hardly published anything. They didn't even cover the latest iPhones (and when they did, it was months after release when no one cared anymore).
Instead we now live in the world of rumours site like WCCftech, and Apple dominance in Tech circle since the iPhone means a lot of new ( relatively speaking ) tech readers are reading Macrumors and 9to5Mac as their tech new sources. Reporting things that those reporter dont understand and keep making fake rumours that makes absolutely no sense.
I can't wonder if AnandTech had a substack angle it might have provided an option?
Good, useful writing that teaches you how to look at, understand, use, or do something is invaluable. Creating beginners is everything in this world so they can progress.
David Kanter doesn't write articles very much these days, but Real World Tech has always had top-shelf stuff and it's one of the few places where all the comments are worth reading too.
Hard to imagine that type of content being lucrative from a display-ad point of view if they used traditional ad networks, but the effort was absolutely appreciated and respected by readers.
A sad day but considering how the online ad market has tried to force publishers to focus on video content an understandable one for printed-word journalists. It's awful.
But apparently right now it pays more to do a cheap video review on YouTube with fake benchmarks, you get the hundred thousands video views, sell the hardware and call it a day.
You can see this in the fact that RISC-V and ARM architectures have caught up with x86 performance even though x86 has had a decade long head start and billions more invested in development.
We are quickly approaching a weird space. Barring some major innovations, you are likely to see that 10 year old equipment remains competitive with brand new products in terms of performance.
Concerning RISC-V having caught up with x86 performance: dream on ... :-(
My M1 (standard) CPU is definitely faster than my Ryzen 7700x on some tasks, and it blows it away on perf/watt.
However, high-end workstations, compute-focused servers, and supercomputers, which use extremely expensive and power-hungry x86 chips, are a different segment, one to which ARM currently has no direct answer (and some might argue it shouldn't have one because such wasteful things shouldn't exist). This segment once had a number of competitive RISC players, like POWER and SPARC, so I don't think it's unobtainable for ARM.
There's at least 2 in the top 10, and the fugaku was the fastest in the world for a couple of years between 2020 and 2022.
It allows for an architecture to deepen pipelines, add registers, add cache, and pull off tricks like SMT.
> the ISA chosen doesn't have much to do with the performance of CPUs
That's somewhat my point, the limiting factor for ISA performance is the physics surrounding the transistors.
I suppose they can't force inject 5-15 second ads though, so maybe folks like us brought this on ourselves.
https://www.proofnews.org/apple-nvidia-anthropic-used-thousa...
yeah yeah adblock pihole yes I know.
But some long videos are excellent, well-made and informative.
Perhaps when the OP needs the info right now he may be more stressed and less in control of himself?
Especially due to all the filler b/s that every YT video has these days, be it over sharing their back story, Like and Subscribe! (And ding that bell!), sponsored ad reads, here’s my ten other videos you need to watch, etc etc.
In my experience this is far more rare than a well written, comprehensive set of instructions.
Even the tiniest youtube channel with 3 digit subscriber numbers recorded on the owners phone will edit out the "boring" bits. At least for any task that takes more than 2-3 minutes. If the task is short enough then yeah, they will often leave in the whole thing.
It depends on the information. For DIY information for example i find it much better to see someone show how to lay brick or frame a wall than to read how it is done.
Where I like a video, is for example of a teardown of a device. HowTo videos of practical skills. Watching a professional use his tools.
But even then, I often prefer text with good pictures.
Videos are terrible when you need a small amount of information that's embedded in a much longer video.
The second scenario is much more common for me than the first.
There is no equivalent for that for text, even though Substack is trying.
If I wrote an article, what are even my options to share it?
Video you, have YouTube, insti, tiktok etc to get discovered on and people can even find it.
I was once able to fix my toilet watching an Indonesian video. I understood approximately zero, but I could still follow that guy's hands.
It is a different story with programming or other abstract/text-based tasks, but when it comes to anything done with hands, I like a video better.
3blue1brown videos on maths are beautiful as well. I wish I had them when I was 18.
It is partly the form, video, but more so the access method, the network. All networked video sucks at skimming through because the file isn't cached and takes a few milliseconds to several seconds to load the part you jumped to. The interface also doesn't help because usually they lack controls for skipping forwards and backwards and long jumps forwards and backwards.
A 12 minute "Here is my favorite method for unclogging a drain" video becomes a three sentence reply from gemini telling you what it is.
I don't know how google is gonna get this past creators if they fully role it out, as it is a massive shameless backstab, but at the same time it is wonderful for viewers who don't want to trudge through filler video after clickbait headlines.
It's come full circle, just that the wheel now consumes orders of magnitude more power to churn the final text.
What could be a couple of paragraphs is stretched into a 5-10 minute video; most of which is explaining what it is, and not how to do it
Do not worry: in a very short while we'll all have AI tools, running locally, that can summarize videos in textual forms in a split second.
Prompt: "Summarize this vid in five paragraphs. List specs."
It already exists. In a short while we'll all have this at home.
P.S: prompt: "Remove every single ad and submarine content too".
Thank god for progress. What would we do without it.
Does 5 minutes of side by side videos of GPUs playing a game at 120fps, encoded as a 60fps video, really help anyone?
If you watch or read reviews, you'd think only people in poverty use 4070s. I play competitive games and everything else I want to do with this card without issues and even with gas left in the tank.
They crank up settings in reviews to ultra settings and then try to make it look like if you don't have a $1200 GPU that you have trash. Reality is that these GPUs are overkill and in many games medium settings look nearly identical to ultra. I swear GPU manufacturers pay to have ultra settings available, with their nearly imperceptible improvements. The option is mostly there as far as I can tell, simply to upsell GPUs.
I've noticed more success with classifieds that have a video vs ones with a thorough description. I've always made efforts to include all relevant information in a post, and it recently dawned on me (while answering a dumb question) that a lot of people just don't read anymore.
In the very unlikely hypothetical that youtube were to allow other formats such as articles or images, I suspect many publishers would be able to make that work - on that plaform, as opposed to on a standalone website without the traffic attracting algorithm to help crowdsource valuable content for users.
Doesn't help that Google search results spam videos they make money from in a carousel at the top of almost every query.
It never seems to rank in search results, though, so it's easy to forget it exists... But it makes a lot of sense. The charts & script is already created anyway for the video, just edit it a bit to fit written form better and you're basically done
The speed at which it loads without all the ad, tracking, and analytics bullshit is amazing. Especially on mobile.
Which is what I liked about it, but possibly doomed them.
Sounds like it difficult to make enough to survive unless you're doing these things.
Which I suspect ties back to things like Google (and others) neglecting the quality of organic search, pushing it down the page, etc. Or competing with quality content by exposing it in snippets and AI summaries with only subtle ways to get to the actual article.
I suppose, if that's the case, those practices eventually eat their own tail. No new Anandtech content to ignore or copy now, for example.
Yup. However, I can't find a confirmation anywhere in TFA. Just some hints here and there. So I wonder, what finally made them quit?
If you're on an advertising model, yes, impossible even.
If you're on a patronage/subscription model, totally doable nowadays.
It might be impossible to have independent journalism with the internet as it currently is.
I don’t know what the alternative is, but I do sometimes wonder what would have happened if search engines had been prevented from displaying search results from news organizations that happened within the last month. This might have trained internet folks to go to the news websites for news and kept the economics propped up a bit better than the disaster it currently is.
News sites would probably change whatever metadata Google is using to check site age to make their news articles appear one-day-more-than-month old to Google crawlers, all as a part of Search Engine Optimization techniques.
The idea is still nonesense because some other search engine will show up without this restriction, and any news site would prefer to be listed there, rather than not.
Craigslist basically killed that entire subindustry by giving the service away for free.
This is a remarkably-astute comment. The problem is that it is very difficult for people to be aware, in any given moment, that a seemingly-innocuous action they're taking now will have devastating consequences in a decade or a century or more. This is made more difficult by well-heeled commercial interests which are highly motivated to discourage such insight. Ultimately, one of the roles of government, and it seems strange to say this, is to develop laws which paternalistically protect people from themselves. As an example of this, see privacy/data protection legislation for the internet, e.g. GDPR. As a counter example, see any country which very deliberately avoids developing privacy legislation for the internet.
The idea of being a "responsible consumer" at most just delays the inevitable shutdown for a few years, because economies of scale is a real thing. Moralizing to people that they need to spend more money / time / convenience / change their habits isn't effective, because even if consumers are genuinely interested in making sacrifices in exchange for quality, everything that's independent is closing anyway when the small owners sell out to whoever is buying. Those who thrive on mergers and acquisition don't care whether consumers are "responsible".
Consumers aren't children or robots, but we also don't have any choice or agency.. in the US at least there are 4-5 companies that make 80% of the groceries you buy. Telecommunications and media are going to look even worse, depending on how you want to measure it. As much as I hate to say it, it looks like only big government can protect us from big business. So yes, blaming big tech is missing the point, but so is blaming consumers. Write your congressman I guess? Wish I could write his economist instead though.. for whatever reason discouraging monopolies doesn't seem to work, so maybe we should look instead at deliberately incentivizing variety.
I get that online publications have to advertise, but to do it with auto-play video w/ audio of unrelated content, animated/video ads, ads for items you already bought a month ago, the outright scam ads, SEO garbage ("this one trick to get a supermodel girlfriend"), superstitials blocking content, dark pattern ads (e.g. x icon opens a link rather than closes the ad), ads that move and hover on the page when you scroll down.
I could go on for longer, but I'm getting that same negative physical reaction by simply describing this crap.
At that point, 2000ish, there wasnt much newspaper journalism left to be sustained. Most US print news was gannett and knight ridder recycling AP/reuters wire stories. A handful of national/global mastheads could sustain real investigative reporters and foreign bureaus, for a little while.
Personally I dont see how (quality) “free to read” news persists. Quality and depth is the differentiation, and the consumer needs to pay for it. Id bet more on the bloomberg/the economist/stratfor models continuing in to the future.
Tangent: Interesting coincidence that this is ten years to the day of Ryan Smith's tenure.
Although via videos rather than articles, sadly.
It's sad how much information is moving to a much slower and data-intensive medium. The same is happening in lots of other areas as well, like game development. Articles always been easier for me to consume, but more and more valuable information is moving into videos these days that it's hard to avoid even though I prefer other mediums...
I recall them talking about how they prefer writing articles, especially given how info-dumpy their content tends to be, but videos are what actually pays the bills.
And if the channels themselves won't do it, I wonder when it will be possible for the user to do it.
It seems like this is probably something that is already possible in a "good enough usually, even if not perfect" sense. I can imagine not too far in the future that a version of this could even embed clips/screenshots from the video for any portions where seeing how it is done is a useful addition to the text.
Now we have HD videos pushing the same (and arguably worse) content taking tens if not hundreds of MBs and conveying the same information that is much harder to parse than a text file could do in a few kilobytes.
I feel like I am having my old man yells at cloud moment here, but its a hugely inferior medium.
For me, the beginning of the end was when Anand and Brian Klug both moved to Apple. While I bet that they're doing great things there, I've been significantly less fascinated by new hardware, and in particular Apple hardware, ever since.
Shiny exteriors and magical features might appeal to many, but to me, somebody explaining in all detail what makes it work doesn't take anything away from the magic – quite the opposite.
I've been reading them since before my teenage years and they got me interested in the insides of tech enough for me to pursue and gain my degree in Computer Engineering. It definitely changed when Anand and Brian left, but end of an era now that the site is shutting down.
Apple is doing amazing things with Apple silicon.
Anandtech was great at exploring these secrets and presenting their findings in a great way. That's what I miss.
I thought Tom’s Hardware was very consumer oriented, and didn’t go into nearly as much detail the way AnandTech did.
This is often not how these things go, and Future PLC deserves credit for good citizenship.
That’s the core of it. And too bad they’re off. Finding a news outlet that isn’t “tweeting” an article and isn’t a blog post on HN was great. And while they mention Tom’s hardware. It always felt (to me) less verbose where I needed it.
Fair well.
Fare is unrelated to fair:
> From Middle English farewel, from fare wel! (and the variants with the personal pronoun "fare ye well" and "fare you well" used in the Renaissance), an imperative expression, possibly further derived from Old English far wel!, equivalent to fare (“to fare, travel, journey”) + well.*
* https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/farewell#Etymology
* https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fare
So to say "farewell" to someones is "have a good journey (in life?)".
I can only assume, but considering the Dutch "vaarwel" is so close to English, I'm going to guess it means "Go well" - or more poetically when speaking of one's path in life: may fate treat you well.
True, but ‘fair well’ was likely just a misspelling.
> So to say “farewell” to someones is “have a good journey (in life?)”
On the wiki page for ‘fare’, you have to scroll a little to see the most relevant usage - see Etymology 2 definitions 2, 4, and 5. To get along, to pass through an experience, to happen, to progress.
As a verb, farewell is roughly synonymous with ‘be well’. (This agrees with have a good journey in life, but it doesn’t need to be thought of as travel or an analogy to travel, the meaning and common usage of farewell is already abstract and more general than travel, e.g., “how has your business fared?”)
As a noun, farewell has come to mean a valediction (the opposite of a greeting): wishing someone well when parting. Funny enough, valediction in multiple dictionaries I just checked is defined as a farewell or as the act of bidding farewell.
Adiós - A diós - go to god. [1]
[0] https://www.thetabernaclechoir.org/articles/goodbye-is-short...
[1] https://www.spanishdict.com/answers/145252/origins-of-adis
Today - well, two possible things have happened. Either scamming search engines have become too effective for even a company with the resources of Alphabet to mitigate. Or, Google optimised for revenue rather than knowledge indexing. Which one seems more likely?
Google is still better at it than their competition, but Google’s model is now being pressured by big money. Local businesses in Europe are simply losing any sort of search auction to the Chinese sites as an example.
Anyway, you can always pay for Kagi if you want a better experience on the internet.
Adwords - clearly marked as ads. Or are you suggesting the results themselves could be bought and sold? This was definitely not the case.
> Do you think that selling result placement for keywords and search terms to the highest bidder had a higher resilience to search engine optimisation than other search engines?
Again, manipulating the actual results via financial inducement to google was not a thing. Quite the reverse.
> A lot of their early competition around the world didn’t really do “search” as much as they did a combination of web content in a “portal” sort of presentation.
I’m not sure why you have this impression. There were many competitors for search prior and concurrent with google that operated in the same fashion. As I said earlier, they were simply hacked into uselessness. The concept of adversarial knowledge indexing was at this time new; PageRank was a novel and revolutionary solution.
Ad words spending had clear manipulations on the organic search algorithm. More spending meant better organic search placement. This is officially denied, but I saw this take place.
Having said that, I think it's clear the quality of non-ad search results isn't great, but I don't know if that's due to perverse incentives on Google's side or just the increasing sophistication of SEO defeating Google's relevance ranking.
It also describes the situation as it is now, not how it was when Google still cared about search results. The paid ads didn't use to be part of the search resuls list at all but instead were clearly delineated.
- Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine
To be candid, this might be the problem.
If we treated people with humanity and respect, we might not be so keen to throw them under the bus for a buck.
For Google (and others) you are the product even if you paid for it (Android).
It just so happens that their culture and employees value a “quality” that is distinctly incongruent with the wider 6b-person public. And also they completely dropped the ball on spam 10 years ago when (among other things) Matt Cutts left.
Don’t write off Google. They are an important case study of their own flavor of greed.
Future plc and their rooted in the 2000s, absolutely horrible website structure that is forced on every news outlet they own... bleh. Ancient mammoths need a good spanking.
(Surely, you jest?!)
That attention to technical detail and knowledge is why people like Der8auer have an audience today and people respect his opinion.
Without trackers and superfluous images, excessive CSS etc you could load a nice long article reasonably quickly. Text does not need to be split like that. It was done for $$$. Ars even offered a pagination escape hatch as a premium benefit at one point.
I was around when the ghz wars were happening. I remember reading SharkyExtreme, hothardware, 2CPU.com, hardocp, anandtech and others for their reviews.
Sad. Very sad. I almost wish they had not decided to close up shop. Instead spin out and go sub only.
The number of random Kamala blow job innuendo comments I’ve seen posted in completely unrelated topics in the last few jobs is disheartening.
CPU Microarchitecture analysis was the best, after Ars Technica cofounder Jon Stokes retired from his site: Anand and Brian Klug and Ian Cutress; I'm certain I've overlooked a few stellar tech analysts.
Especially during the era when Intel was trying to wedge x86 into mobile and even wearable devices.
Of late, the site has been posting the occasional deep-dive hardware review (notably, PC power supplies by E. Fylladitakis) and industry breaking news (Ganesh, Anton Shilov), but it's all moved to Tom's Hardware.
Selling it to have time with his kids (IIRC) was a fantastic choice, but I miss his version of it for sure.
Anandtech Tech Report HardOCP Ars Technica (Eric Berger is the lone holdout here) Slashdot
the list goes on. I'm glad at least that Anand went out as he went in. Thanks for all the years, Anand!
Chips and Cheese https://chipsandcheese.com/
Serve the Home https://www.servethehome.com/
Tom's Hardware https://www.tomshardware.com/
I find their content generally pretty high quality for their niche (with Beth Mole's and Eric Berger's content being my personal standouts), but Ars Technica is by no means a substitute for a site like AnandTech.
Serve the Home - some articles only. Others are bad.
C & C - no comment, not enough experience with them.
Occasionally:
LTT (Linus Tech Tips), very commercial
Hardware Unboxing
Gamer's Nexus
JayzTwoCents
der8auer
Thanks, and farewell!
Reading articles and discussions there was my first experience getting into tech and helped my build my first computer.
I hope the editor and writers of Anandtech know the impact they had!
On a brighter note, Chips and Cheese are continuing the effort of quality technical journalism.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/1094
Uni had fiber to the dorm room, so I was interested in maximizing available bandwidth through the rest of the system. Which in P4 / PCI days wasn't trivial!
Ironically enough, I still have that motherboard downstairs in a backup system, humming away... with a Pentium M via adapter. :)
Couldn't bring myself to put it out to pasture, and thought it was an interesting inflection point as "the last of the Netburst" era.
Interestingly enough, one of my favorite uni classes was on microprocessor design, taught by someone who apparently taught Anand at NC (Tom Conte).
RIP. But better to call it quits when they're playing the send-off music.
So the status of that content needs to be discussed and how that can be preserved!
I keep thinking that these specialized forums that lost space to Reddit could be revived if were integrated with ActivityPub.
THANK YOU!
Quite sad, we lost two of the greatest tech journalism of yesteryears, Game Informer and now Anandtech. Maximum PC barely hung on and later were boughtout by PCgamer.
I doubt anything will replace the in-depth tech journalism of Anandtech without visible paid biases and manipulation by big tech. I think Video centric media tech houses will rule the roost like Linus Media, GamerNexus and HuB.
Hoping Igors lab, chips&cheese and der8auer to carry the baton forward. I will kiss an old LGA 775 processor in their honor, rest in circuits.
But once Anand left, the site started dying. They posted 1 review a month, and didn't even cover the iphone or galaxy or pixel launches. How on earth was that meant to survive?
I hope tomorrow's enthusiasts take up the torch of deep technical reporting and fight back against all the shallow, clickbait reporting out there.
Distilling what you like about a thing and then build it (and don't forget that finding someone to pay you to do it is essential too) is key. Intellectual honesty is key in this process: You have to be honest about what you like about the Acquisition, Assimilation, and Dissemination of your ideas and product. They did that so well.
I always thought that whatever I wanted to build, it has something complex(and hence cool), but it could instead just what I want and have it be cool anyway.
Interestingly it was just last week that I was looking into building a NAS (Synology is leaning in hard on enshitification lately) and its suprisingly feasible, and I was wondering why no one talks about motherboards anymore, only CPUs/GPUs, and occasionally disks (spinning rust or solid state)- I thought I might have just been mentally ignoring those articles, but they really don't exist anymore. Ars/Anand/Toms had reviews for models once every 6 months or so.
Into the graveyard you go with, Aces Hardware, Sharky Extreme, Thresh's Firingsquad, and I am sure I am forgetting others that I used to load up every day but just don't exist anymore.
What are people reading these days for hardware reviews?
I find that Notebookcheck and GSMArena are decent for laptop and phone reviews respectively.
I hope they open source their benchmarking procedures. It’s valuable to see the results of comparable testing across multiple generations of hardware.
The era of unbiased, objective and deeply technical journalism is dying out. Sad.
A postscript deep dive article for AnandTech could look at the audience and business metrics of an ad-funded tech review site in 2024, in the context of competition from substack, Discord/Patreon, YouTube, neo-cable-tv, and other channels.
Does Algolia have enough data for a graph of AnandTech article discussions on HN, e.g. submissions and comments?
It helped me dream larger than my surroundings; which in turn helped me get out of an unstable home, poverty, and a dead-end town. I was sad when [H]ardOCP went down, but this hits different.
It's sad to see the state of 'tech journalism' in the Youtube age when it comes to hardware products. I feel like I'm watching a 20-minute lifestyle commercial rather than an actual nuts-and-bolts review. I guess that's what gets views and affiliate link revenue now.
Dr. Ian Cutress did a video of his thoughts. (Just a subscriber of his channel)
I'm glad the forums continue and hope they thrive. Those forums are where I started my tech support journey 20+ years ago. It'll be interesting to see if Toms can fill in some of the more in-depth, technical and objective reporting.
I can't think of many other sites that have been around this long. https://www.bluesnews.com/ for gaming news comes to mind. It's been going since 96.
It's actually crazy how fast new media became old media.
This makes me wonder if there's a way to preserve websites indefinitely in ebook form. A small device that contains the entire history of a website, and is self-contained in the ebook. The device would obviously require power and the hardware could degrade, but this could be mitigated by making the hardware replaceable, or rather the content swappable across devices.
It seems like a middle ground between durability/portability (printed book) and usability/access (website).
Y'all will be missed.
[1] https://www.prefetchers.info/ [2] https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-de...
How anyone finds anything I don't know but I guess we'll find out!
I am disturbed by the death of long-form content happening. Google is failing.
We need a case to be made for enthusiast-owned media. Anything left to the corporates will eventually degrade and die.
This is something I will work on, once I reach the stage of my life that involves capital. Things need to be better for the niche reporting world.
Goodbye, and thank you for the content that has accompanied me for more than a decade.
I'll miss them, but for what it's worth they could probably be replaced by one guy with a decent substack. Or maybe that already exists, if anyone has any recommendations let me know.
AnandTech - one of THE sites that literally done hardware upbringing for me ... will be no more.
Thank you for all the in depth reviews and explanation how hardware work - I use this knowledge to this day ...
Farewell.
* Rise of social media
* Popularity of short-form video
* Significant deceleration in single-core performance gains
* Focus on fashion (e.g. colored LEDs) over performance in computers
* Popularity of smartphones/consoles
People have been tricking out their rigs with fancy lighting since the beginning, it's not a new development.
Anandtech was always reliable. It was Tom's Hardware when Tom's Hardware sold out (some 20 years ago). Many here may not even know that Tom's Hardware was originally a well-respected source of information. But I guess Tom's Hardware was a glimpse into the future, low-quality content litttered with affiliate-spam.
But there is a market for high-quality content still. I can't help but think that the article sites simply failed to adapt. Look at Linus's Tech Tips [1]. Yes, video production is expensive but the advertising revenue is also higher.
None of these sites seemed to have adapted to the world of short form video content (Tiktok, Youtube Shorts, IG Reels) in a way that feels fresh, organic and useful.
Reddit seems to be the last bastion of getting authentic information and even that is steadily getting astroturfed.
Very true. But, in-depth reporting doesn't have to be not-sexy either. Considering the marked drop in audience attention spans in today's world along with the emergence of AI-driven knowledge sources, journalists will benefit a lot from just improving their presentation from long-form writing to something analogous to presentation slides with understandable visualizations.
The one that bugged me was the monthly roundup of HDDs where, usually, they recommended that you pay $100 extra to get an expensive consumer HDD that, according to the spec sheet, was 3db quieter and consumed maybe 0.5W less than an inexpensive enterprise HDD (funny reversal, but the enterprise product is a mass-produced product they sell a lot of and all the hyper-thin SKUs aimed at consumers probably sold one here and one there) although anything is one bad bearing away from being 20db louder.
This went in for years but they never confronted the issue directly by taking measurements or asking if the HDD industry was destroying itself by offering too many SKUs — if WD had just one SKU maybe Best Buy would stock it, but if there is a different one for a 2 bay NAS, a 3 bay NAS, a 4 bay NAS, and for recording video they won’t stock any of them. (And with all those spurious choices they didn’t give you a clear choice of CMR vs SMR!)
Charlie Demerjian stands almost alone as a tech journalist who doesn’t get high on the industry’s supply and, on that level, Anandtech was another tech outlet dependent on that industry that couldn’t give it the tough love to point out rampant brand destruction. Charlie told you 5 years ago that Intel’s product roadmap was a suicide note, Anandtech sure didn’t.
Back when I worked at a semiconductor company, reading any articles about us was always very funny because it always had more things wrong than right.
Thanks for all the good work!
Good jab!
Even though it’s not best financially.
good run, and remember from the late 90s - later at my interview in Lehman Brothers, the hiring manager was looking at the site when I walked in and that was the small talk. RIP AnandTech
Tech report became a zombie about a decade ago.
Tom's hardware has always just been 'mid'.
I feel old
I am happy at least that there are others trying to carry the torch. Gamer's Nexus, Chips and Cheese, and a few small blogs here and there are still trying to dig into the nitty gritty of computer hardware in a way that's not only approachable, but accurate, without all the marketing BS. It's unfortunate though that it's so hard to make something like this survive.
> AnandTech’s final boss
Quips like that, are one reason.
It first stated as the journey of AMD CPU. Who wouldn't want the best bang for the bucks. And then Pentium II / III, SSE. Pentium 4, Itanium, AMD64. Pentium M, Core, and then the rise of SSD. In between that we also have many Video Card reviews, S3, Matrox, Voodoo, Nvidia, ATI, PowerVR, explanation of Playstation CELL processor. Creative Sound Blaster. I think by mid 2000 all those news were quite boring. Largely because most of the consumer decisions are settled. Until iPhone came around Anandtech was the first and perhaps still the only tech site that goes behind the scene and start looking not only the Apple technology but a educational guess behind the rationale why some of those product decisions were introduced. And only after a few years Anand himself got hired from Apple.
I also remember my first death threat on Anandtech Forums from Intel Fan Boys. That was before most tech people knew much about TSMC. There was a time when people think Intel is an undisputed king in technology and wont believe TSMC would take over.
Lot of memories. It is very unfortunate Anandtech is closing down. I just wish I am a multi billionaire and could buy it and keep it running even as a hobby. Somewhat fortunate is that we have Chips and Cheese, a relatively new site which fills a lot of what Anandtech used to do. Servethehome for Enterprise section.
Really Sad. I know some of current and ex-anandtech staff lurks on HN but dont post much. Farewell, Thank You and Good Luck to you all.
feels like the old internet is nearly gone
This is very darkly ominous and of course it does not apply just to tech journalism.
Written communication, by real people, is not an optional luxury, its the best means to exchange dense, valuable, high quality information.
It feels as if the current digital "economy" is hell-bent to turn society into an illiterate, short-video watching, ad-clicking mob.
Not sure there has ever been technological innovation that was so regressive in its impact, profiting by actively degrading the human condition. Alas, here we are and we can't blame the Martians.
cash is effectively claims against what other people can give you in the future.
An illiterate mob can only give you very few things of value. So, indeed, this is short-termism running society to the ground - as if there is no tomorrow.
After all, not everyone was in favor of the pulp that churned from mass-market printing presses.
However, I can certainly imagine a voice-enabled LLM trained on European History that students could learn a lot from. People have been printing books for 500+ years, but we’ve really only gotten into user-generated video within the past 10 years.
Throughout my childhood video was really quite time-consuming to produce. It largely still is. If we can continue get that friction down, then over time I expect we’ll se more and more valuable video content being produced.
Progress has essentially halted since 15+ years. Back then a new computer really coud do something the old one didn't even dreamt of. Now what can the new generation of CPU do? Watch YouTube shorts even shorter? :) Or the new Android or Apple phone? Send more pictures on WhatsApp? Literally don't see any difference between my current phone / computer compared to what I had 10 years ago. (I don't play games, maybe there it's visible somewhat).
Anyhow, it was nice while it lasted but all good things must come to an end ... Bye Anandtech, you will be remembered.
On the one hand a bittersweet end to a familiar editorial, on the other hand a deserved end to one of many "journalism" outlets. No, I don't have a good opinion of journalists.
In any case, RIP.
I'd like to bring AnandTech content to the public domain. Put it on the world wide scroll.
Let me know if I can help breck7@gmail.com
> Our publisher, Future PLC, will be keeping the AnandTech website and its many articles live indefinitely. So that all of the content we’ve created over the years remains accessible and citable.
The difference, I think, is that media is shifting to video as the default, for better or worse. Looking at their YouTube channel, AnandTech only has about 20,000 subscribers, which looks like they never quite figured out how to transfer their content into video format.
The main reason for tech journalism being more sustainable on YouTube is non-skippable ads and the recommendation algorithm.
Compare AnandTech which has always been a user-hostile visual insult. The whole article is covered in ads. You can barely find the words. The articles are needlessly split over 25 pages so you click and load over and over. They really pioneered a lot of bad patterns.
Yes, and I do that myself, but most people don’t, and the overall model wouldn’t work without the ads.
At least they have a website with the same material.
Have a look at rtings and try to come up with an idea how to make this work in a video format:
https://www.rtings.com/headphones/reviews/sony/wh-1000xm4-wi...
https://www.rtings.com/mouse/reviews/logitech/g305-lightspee...
without losing 90% of information and getting shitty jokes instead.
At this point, I think efforts would be better placed in making a method that enables videos to be viewed in a way akin to text. AI transcription tools are getting there, so I think it might just be a matter of time.
If this trend were merely about format, then websites that just host videos would be a viable model - they're not really. I think this is more about the power of platforms than of the format.
I'm sure the format _also_ helps, given how donation-dependent small-scale publishers are which works best if publishers are humanized, but I'd guess the more impactful matter is the way platforms can keep consumers onboard and help them discover new publishers than the format.
This is going to get worse: the elementary and middle school teachers/education professionals have been screaming at us that there's a major issue with reading in the upcoming generation due to a change in how many schools taught reading for several years that turned out to be a horrible idea. Add the pandemic on top of it (because losing a year of learning is a big deal at the elementary school level), and now we have a generation who can't read.
I think we're going back to having a literate class and a non-literate class, honestly. I can't see us putting in the time, money, and effort to fix the situation. Instead we'll just change formats (and probably have a bunch of middle men pop up that turn text into video with AI for the illiterate).
We're never going to see general purpose text again as a culture. Text will only be primary in certain audiences. (Lawyers, software people, librarians, etc.)
OT: you are the same mezzie as mezzie was?
I chop my accounts every once in a while so I don't get too attached to them/so my karma doesn't influence how people receive my ideas.
I also take breaks for a few months from each social site fairly regularly to ensure that they're not slowly boiling my brain into brain rot.
And I really do think we'll just give up on the idea of literacy being required in society as that generation grows up. Fixing it would be too much work and cost too much money/time, and would be incompatible with current American social values. I also genuinely do think a lot of Boomers and Gen X have mild lead poisoning, so our elders are probably also going to struggle more the older they get. (Who knows, maybe the microplastics are also eating the contextual reasoning parts of our brains and we'll have the same problem.) So if 80% of society isn't functionally literate, functional literacy will go away as an information requirement for the average citizen.
I wouldn't be shocked if literacy becomes a college level skill that's only taught until students stop having to consult sources/teaching materials from before the 2010s/2020s. There will be a few exceptions, like the historians, but eventually literacy is going to be seen as an eccentric skill that used to be a sign of culture but is no longer relevant. (As an example, my basic knowledge of Latin would be very impressive in a lot of historical periods but in 2024 America it's just a weird personal quirk.)
So do countless children and adults today. It's in a lot of people's water.
I used to live in Flint. Maybe that's why I didn't remember to mention it...
I have some family in Chicago who haven't been able to drink their tap water for years. The city will get around to replacing the pipes eventually, but it's a mess. (https://www.chicagotribune.com/2024/05/27/chicago-lead-pipes...)
Even then, I think readers overestimate the amount of people that are/were actually reading serious literature. Even when literacy and books were at their peaks, most people were reading pulp novels and other low-end books.
So while I don't really disagree with you per se, I do think it's unnecessarily pessimistic, and it's a better approach to try and approach this new media format with fresh eyes and optimism.
> Even then, I think readers overestimate the amount of people that are/were actually reading serious literature. Even when literacy and books were at their peaks, most people were reading pulp novels and other low-end books.
Oh, absolutely. People into 'serious' literature have always been a minority and definitely never close to the average person's experience with the written word. I think what we're seeing is more that less literacy is needed to be functional in society. The average PMC/middle class person in the 1970s needed a higher rate of literacy than they do in 2024 because video used to be a lot more expensive to create and disseminate: I work in corporate training and the videos we create now would have been handbooks or factsheets in the 70s/80s. For domain specific or technical knowledge, the written word was basically the only option for several decades (aside from like...audio tapes, which have their own issues). Housewives used to have to grab different flyers from grocery stores and price compare, everyone had to be able to read maps (with no spoken directions), mechanics had to consult the Giant Car Books, etc. This did present a lot of problems for people who didn't or couldn't reach that level of literacy for whatever reason, and I'm glad those people (e.g. those with dyslexia, those who were forced to read in a language they didn't know well, etc.) have better options now.
> So while I don't really disagree with you per se, I do think it's unnecessarily pessimistic, and it's a better approach to try and approach this new media format with fresh eyes and optimism.
I'm neutral on the shift from a societal perspective. My main point of judgement is more 'our changes are happening because we lack the political will to address issues' rather than the changes themselves. For example, if we want to commit to video being the default form, we should have video literacy classes in the same way we did written literacy: People should know basic video creation techniques, be able to determine what makes a video more/less trustworthy, how to effectively navigate through a video, how to use videos as reference pieces, etc. I'm displeased because the post-literate world is coming about due to a failure of education and governance rather than due to the positives of video. But objectively, the shift from the written word to video isn't any worse than the shift from oral tradition to the written word. It also makes sense since humans learn by imitation and are very visual animals.
I'm personally pessimistic, but that's because I'm visually impaired, so everything being primarily focused on inalterable visuals is a loss for me (whereas an article I can make big text/zoom/print/whatever for accessibility purposes), but I've also been sad about that since Instagram started and made everything about pictures. Video is an improvement there: At least I can follow videos by sound.
As of 2023, roughly 65% of all internet traffic came from video sites,[4] up from 51% in 2016.
Facebook, for example, famously misrepresented market demand for video. Video is what advertisers were asking for: https://slate.com/technology/2018/10/facebook-online-video-p...
His content doesn't have the journalistic quality that feels like he is going out and digging for stories etc. The content is given to him by companies and he chooses to showcase what he is given.
There is not really anything wrong with that either but I don't expect any real scoops to come from his channel.
>Marques Brownlee ( MKBHD )
I think comparing Anandtech to MKBHD is quite offensive. There is at least multiple order of magnitude difference.