What a shame. The Awl has consistently been one of my first stops in my Feedly tab. Guess I should have been clicking through and viewing the ads. :(

I'll miss the site. Can anybody recommend other sites that are like The Awl? I don't really know any alternatives.

"For nearly a decade we followed a dream of building a better Internet".

Perhaps the low quality articles was the issue.. here's a recent article title "Nothing Makes Sense Any More, Nothing Will Make It Make Sense".

I went there and was delighted with "Jared Kushner Wears The Wrong Socks". If that is what the better internet looks like, I think I'm fine with that I have right now for a while, thankyouverymuch.

I'm going to miss this site but I'm also surprised it lasted as long as it did. At least the writers they brought in are still working so there's something to look forward to.

January must be the time for these things. Very sad to see Two communities* close in the same week.

*the other community was Boatertalk. Dedicated to whitewater kayaking and ultimately lost to Facebook

This was a huge disappointment for me. Boatertalk was an awesome community, and was one of the main enablers for me to not be on facebook. Sad day.

RIP bato.to as well.

I'm not surprised by this. Occasionally I would find something very interesting in the Awl, but I feel that over the past few years the drive, and editorial excellence really dropped off. The articles didn't have the same depth.

By and by if you're looking for an alternative, you might consider Pacific Standard (Suggested article: https://psmag.com/social-justice/toast-story-latest-artisana...) or

Aeon: https://aeon.co/

Awl good things must come to an end, I suppose.

I had never heard of The Awl. Opening their home page, the main thing I see is an article titled "The Miscellaneous Bros of Bodybuilding.com" with the tag "A waste of virgins". Based on this extremely limited exposure, I can't say I'm sad to see it go.

What part of this comment seemed like a useful contribution to HN? If you knew anything about The Awl and didn't like it, that criticism would be useful: you'd be telling us things about it that we potentially didn't know or hadn't thought about. If you didn't know about The Awl, went and looked at it, and had something interesting to say about what you learned: that too would be interesting. But to know nothing about it, look at a couple headlines, and report back your discontent? What was the point in that? To provide a nucleation side for more lowbrow dismissal?

The Awl has been one of the most pioneering small publications for nearly a decade: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Awl

I mean, I guess you can judge all that work based on a cursory scan of one of their last stories if you want to. It just wouldn't be particularly fair.

Like anything, The Awl wasn't for everyone, but I know they published some of the funniest, most touching pieces I've read. This article does a pretty good job of summarizing it's impact on the media industry. https://www.theverge.com/2015/7/9/8908279/the-awl-profile-ch...

Me too, but I had a good chuckle at reading this piece in... "For nearly a decade we followed a dream of building a better Internet, and though we did not manage to do that every day we tried very hard and..."

the way the sentence broke for me was "... and though we did not manage to do that every day" "we tried very hard" rather than what I think was intended as "... and though we did not manage to do that" "every day we tried very hard". My first reading made me say "well if you didn't do that every day then of course".

i have ever heard of alexb138. opening their comment, the main thing i see is that they're an idiot/asshole. i can't say I'm sad to see them go

We've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the site guidelines.

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