I think this is article is Ars Technica scraping the bottom of the barrel for eyeballs. The past few years they have a really nasty habit of publishing low-effort fluff pieces that cater to whatever is the current zeitgeist

PornHub purging all the content they did is remarkable, and certain kinds of content on the site are all but gone. They've likely lost a lot of viewership that way.

Ars is still generally good and I think they write mostly informed pieces that you don't see elsewhere every few months there is something just truly terrible/inane on there. They're also reposting Wired articles which are often not the best.

This stands out as the single worst thing I've ever seen on their site: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/11/this-is-why-ill-...

Summary: Author whines about customer support experiences and makes an ass of themselves, then realizes that all their griping wasn't even necessary because if they had performed some basic troubleshooting they would have realized the problem was elsewhere all along.

As for Pornhubs viewership, I don't think it will go down much. I imagine a large part of their audience just goes to the site and clicks on what looks good to them, maybe filtering by category or searching, but still, they see what's there and they click.

Also in a roundabout way, since now everything on the site is either from their parent company, a partner company, or someone in their model program they are in control of all revenue and are more probably more likely to see people pay for content from their model program members, which they get a cut of.

Depends on one's tastes. There's a lot of fetish material from anonymous uploads that is simply gone. Which sucks for them, cause now I just go to xvideos

As for Ars, they used to have a journo that would publish 10+ page reviews of the latest Mac OS release, and the dude had an extensive knowledge of Apple and Apple products. In a past life I was a journo for one of their competitors for a few years and my EIC was always pointing to Ars as our rival and competitor to take inspiration from. When our publication went downhill I turned to Ars to get the reporting that I wanted, and it feels like that well dried up a few years ago.

In-depth technical articles replaced with inspiration porn and geek fan service. They went from being a slightly-less-nerdy Anandtech to a slightly geekier BuzzFeed or TechDirt

Fuck Conde Nast!

> As for Ars, they used to have a journo that would publish 10+ page reviews of the latest Mac OS release, and the dude had an extensive knowledge of Apple and Apple products.

John Siracusa. He left Ars ~5 years ago, I think. Even after I switched away from OS X, I would still read his reviews.

>PornHub purging all the content they did is remarkable, and certain kinds of content on the site are all but gone.

The absurdity of it is that there was a small minority of animated and computer generated (non-voice acted) nude "dance" videos featuring 3D models. Those were also removed, but likely unintentionally. You can't 'verify' stock 3D models, created from beginning to end by a single person.

Their purge was a broad-brush panic reaction to a smear piece that ran in an issue of the New York Times earlier this month. I'm sure a lot of perfectly fine content got deleted

I don't think that at their scale they have too much problems. I mean, "nobody" quickly will turn to "somebody" with higher prices.

They might have problems with huge monopolists like VISA. But with any competitive business, as long as they don't break the law, they'll just pay higher premiums.

This article has genuine information not easily accessible. The true owners of Mindgeek’s debt are still unknown. The title might be a bit forced, but nothing warranting so much derision.

Would be curious what the average TC is for a SWE.

Montreal salary, so around $60k CAD.

I make 300k in Montreal and know tons of people in the same range.

I don't know TC for Mindgeek but 60k is not even close to the "typical" Montreal salary

Just because you run in circles with people who make super high salaries doesn’t mean they’re that common. Unsurprisingly, people who make 300k TC are more likely than the average to meet other people who make 300k TC.

That said all the numbers I’m finding online are more in in 80-100k Canadian dollars range for salary for the average, so 60k is definitely extremly low for TC.

Plenty do make 60k and 300k is pretty far from being "typical" in Montreal.

I agree though that 60k isn't typical, that would be close to the starting salary. I'm still new though, so couldn't say what's typical, but I think 80k would be a pretty good bet.

120-150k is closer to the average I would say if you work for a public company or a well funded start-up

Top of band for Senior at Shopify is low 200s (varies a bit depending on USD exchange rates) without stock appreciation and it's not particularly competitive

Plenty of SWEs in Los Angeles make 300k+ $US, just look at Netflix. But the average is still in the low-mid 100s.

That's for beginner-intermediate devs. Not software engineers.

Engineers are about 80-140k$CA at MG as far as I know.

Lol!

Friend: So where do you work?

Employee: Pornhub! I work on machine learning algorithms that automatically tag millions of porn videos for specific fetishes!

Friend: OK... What language do you program in?

Employee: Erm, well, uh, nevermind, it's a special hypertext preprocessor language, you've probably never heard of it.

Is it Perl? I bet it is ...