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Comment by bsimpson | Hacker News Reader

I remember when XDA was the home of Android homebrew hackers working on things like CyanogenMod. It's so strange to see it repurposed as the brand for the same quasi-correct tech article slop that gets parroted between all the big blogs.

Tom's Hardware is a bit before my time, but I remember it being well regarded. I've seen a lot of similar articles under that name lately. I wonder if they've undergone similar fates.

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Same with all the bigger tech blogs from a decade ago. How-To Geek is completely overrun with the same sort of slop. Finally had to remove it from my RSS reader.

Oh look at that, XDA and HTG are both owned by Valnet:

https://www.valnetinc.com/en/technology

private equity, what would we do without you?!

At least Anandtech just shut down rather than turning into a zombie tech blog.

I get a lot of XDA articles appearing in my Google News feeds and a good chunk of the ones I read definitely have the slop half baked vibe to them. Where they barely provide much substance in the article and sometimes barely even address what the article headline said. They also pump out so many articles about the same topics. I swear I've seen like 100 articles from them just on Obsidian Notes alone and so many of them are barebones and lackluster.

There is the odd decent nugget in there, but it is a shame seeing them fall like this. Unfortunately the same sentiment is true about most news sites now.

This is not just a Tech Journalism problem, but applies to a lot of other Journalism.

Tom’s Hardware was a fantastic site back in its heyday. Very highly regarded.

The same happened with AndroidPolice

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