Ars writers used to be actual experts, sometimes even phd level, on technical fields. And they used to write fantastical and very informative articles. Who is left now?

There are still a couple of good writers from the old guard and the occasional good new one, but the website is flooded with "tech journalist", claiming to be "android or Apple product experts" or stuff like that, publishing articles that are 90% press material from some company and most of the times seems to have very little technical knowledge.

They also started writing product reviews that I would not be surprised to find out being sponsored, given their content.

Also what's the business with those weirdly formatted articles from wired?

Still a very good website but the quality is diving.

For the curious, this acquisition was 18 years ago.

Happened 18 years ago.

This is a hot take that has become room temp.

I don't think many would say Ars Technica fell off dramatically circa 2010.

Buying a news property is also not comparable to a merger of near equals.

When they started doing car reviews where "GM didn't pay for this car review, they just paid for a car review." everyone should've clued in.

I dropped ars from my rss sometime around covid when they basically dropped their journalism levels to reddit quality. Same hive mind and covering lots of non technical (political) topics. No longer representing its namesake!

What places on the internet remains where articles are written by actual experts? I know only of a few, and they get fewer every year.

At what point in the slide to authoritarianism should that stop? Where is the line?

Yes, I enjoy "both sides" coverage when it's done in earnest. What passes for that today is two people representing the extremes of either spectrum looking for gotcha moments as an "owning" moment. We haven't seen a good "both sides" in decades

I don't see how one honestly argues in favor of an authoritarian government

This is exactly why us Israelis recoil at the anti-Israel demonstrations after October 7th. How the social media platforms were leveraged to promote the bully was a wake up call that we hadn't seen since 1938.

It's not like the death tolls reset on that day.

Israel can have the moral high ground when they stop killing huge amounts of people. Calling them out isn't blood libel. Stop making that argument.

We don't have the moral high ground because we protect our civilians and thus have lower death tolls. We have the moral high ground because we are constantly on the defense from an enemy whose culture is conflict based and violent and vows our destruction.

The West Bank is a part of the state of Israel that was occupied by Jordanian forces from 1948 to 1967. It was then captured by Israel and many Israelis, many of whom lived there before it was occupied by Jordan, moved (back) there.

The West Bank was settled by both Arabs and Jews before 1948 - for literally thousands of years Jews had lived there. In 1856 many more Jews and Arabs began moving there due to changes in Ottoman law meant to encourage settlement of the area (the Ottomans needed tax revenue). It should be noted that Jerusalem was Jewish majority even before the Ottoman land laws changed in 1856. In 1936 there was a large Arab slaughtering of Jews in Hebron, so many Jews were evacuated from Hebron. In 1948 the Arabs rejected the UN partition plan, and started a war. Israel won that war, and thus became the sole successor state of Mandatory Palestine. Jordan occupied part of that successor state (the West Bank). In 1952 (I may have the year wrong) the Arab league declared that no Arab assistance would be provided to those displaced in the war, because only the suffering of those displaced will cause the destruction of the Zionist Entity. In 1964 the Soviets advised a group to represent the Arabs of the West Bank, the Gaza strip, and those displaced in 1948, and that group adopted the name Palestinians to refer to the populations it represents. Israel conquered the Jordanian-occupied territory in 1967 after Jordan attacked Israel, two months later the Arab League adopted it's policy of No Peace, No Negotiation, No Recognition of Israel. In 1995 the West Bank was divided into separate areas. Predominantly Arab areas were given autonomy for self rule, under the Palestinian Authority (mostly PLO) with the intention of all parties to see the establishment of an Arab state called Palestine after final borders and other issues are agreed. Predominantly Jewish areas have Israeli rule redeclared in three year cycles, pending final border agreements. Every single final border solution has been rejected by the Arab side, who have also employed extreme violence both in rhetoric and in actions.

Where in all this are the Jews who live in the West Bank a reason to "lose all faith" that Israel has good intentions. Israel's first intention is to secure the safety of her citizens, just like any other nation. Israel has committed to, and taken reasonable steps to, establish a separate state for those who demand Arab rule.

GP is Israeli, so of course he thinks of Israel.

I understand that we have been villainized by the armies of propaganda funded by oil money. But any interested party could look at the facts of history and realize who is the real bully here.

What's your excuse for thinking of Israel? Maybe try and clear out some brain space by not seeing the whole world through your lens of antisemitism. Israel is a tiny country surrounded by neighbors who want to see it vanish. It's the bully? SMH.

It looks like they know how to grow an audience at the expense of discourse, because those adherent to the popular-online side will heavily attack all publications that discuss the other side. Recognising this, it is hard to seriously consider their impartiality in other fields. It's very much the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect.

"Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know."

-Michael Crichton

Any specific examples? I took a quick browse but didn't find anything that fit what you're talking about, and what you're saying is a bit vague (maybe because I'm not from the US). Could you link a specific article and then tell us what exactly is wrong?

And when I look at the issues being discussed, I do not see something so clear as rainy or sunny. I see one side of contentious issues - issues with good arguements for both sides.

Alice says it's raining. Bob says it's sunny. It's raining. The news says that it's raining. Is it bias? Should the news say that it might be raining or sunny?

Or is the sunny argument recognising that murdering protesters instead of detaining them is not good policy?

A perfect example is toilets - I don't care at all how well a toilet flushes golfballs, because I never flush golfballs.

https://www.terrylove.com/crtoilet.htm

The personal blogs of experts.

> Industry Analyst, More Than Moore. Youtube Influencer and Educator.

Seems they're one example of the sad trend of people going from being experts and instead diving into "influencing" instead, which comes with a massive list of drawbacks.

https://archive.is/2022.02.18-161603/https://www.anandtech.c...

https://www.theregister.com

But I think we do get his point regardless :)

I’ll be interested in finding out more about just what the hell happened here. I hardly think of Benj or Kyle as AI cowboy hacks, something doesn’t add up

You seem to think it means “extra fantastic.” Not correct.

I agree that it's not a good word choice when describing a thing that could actually be fake, but you could describe a view from a mountain as fantastical even though it was 100% real.

In any single instance I don’t get very exercised - we tend to be able to infer what someone means. But the sheer volume of these malapropisms tells me people are losing their grip on our primary form of communication.

Proper dictionaries should be bundled free with smartphones. Apple even has some sort of license as you can pull up definitions via context menus. But a standalone dictionary app you must obtain on your own. (I have but most people will not.)

> Still a very good website

These are indeed quite controversial opinions on ars.

Yes, it’s very different than it was back in the day. You don’t see 20+ page reviews of operating systems anymore, but I still think it’s a worthwhile place to visit.

Trying to survive in this online media market has definitely taken a toll. This current mistake makes me sad.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/09/macos-26-tahoe-the-a...

You can see a new generation of media that charge subscribers enough to make a modest profit, and it's things like Talking Points Memo ($70 base cost per year), Defector ($70 or $80 I think), The Information ($500), 404 ($100), etc.

Josh at TPM has actually been quite open/vocal about how to run a successful (mildly profitable) media site in the current market. I think we are seeing transitions towards more subscriber based sites (more like the magazine model, now that I think about it). See The Verge as a more recent example.

As I mention in another comment, https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/01/exclusive-volvo-tells-u... is in a similar vein.

It is sad that this is what journalism has come to. It is even sadder that it works.

It feels like the human version of AI hallucination: saying what they think is convincing without regard for if it's sincere. And because it mimics trusted speech, it can slip right by your defense mechanisms.

Unfortunately, every review site uses affiliate links. Even organizations with very high ethical standards like Consumer Reports use them now. At least CR still gets most of its income from subscriptions and memberships. I guess that's something.

I haven't always agreed with them and sometimes the articles are clearly wrong because they're several years old, but they're usually good.

(I think I last seriously disagreed with them about a waffle maker.)

This is the real reason I don't trust sources that make money off affiliate links. The incentive is to recommend the more expensive items due to % kickback.

They are just lazy / understaffed. It's hard to make $ in journalism. A longstanding and popular way to cut corners is to let the industry you cover do most of the work for you. You just re-package press releases. You have plausible content for a fraction of the effort / cost.

Most bill in the US Congress are not actually meant to pass, they are just (often poorly written) PR stunts.

AFAIK the only real exception is Consumer Reports.

There was one “journalist” for the New York Times that reviewed cars, and he could never say anything positive about EVs - even to the point of warming consumers of the gloom that is EV. But after digging into his history, it was found he also published a lot of positive fluff pieces for the oil industry lol!

I really think a lot of these organizations have lost touch. The entire premise of their existence relies upon the trust of the readers. That trust relies upon the idea that the writers are consolidating and summarizing expert opinions. Any egregious error like this (especially when they are slow to correction) pose a death sentence to them. It's a questionable error like they were rushing to get first to print (having early access even) yet didn't seem to consult experts other than those on the team.

I think unfortunately this type of pattern is becoming more common and I've defintiely noticed it on sites like ArsTechnica too. Maybe it's that my technological expertise has increased and so I can more easily detect bullshit, but I think the decline is real and not unique to ArsTechnica nor Quanta. It feels like the race to the bottom is only accelerating and there are larger ranging impacts than just the death of specific publishers.

[0] https://www.quantamagazine.org/physicists-create-a-wormhole-...

[1] https://archive.is/20231031231933/https://www.nytimes.com/20...

[2] (Blog even suggests the writers were embarrassed. I'm less forgiving to the writers due to the time to add the editor's note. Had it appeared shortly after I would be just as forgiving) https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6871

[3] https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/12/no-physicists-didnt-...

Unfortunately, this is my impression as well.

I really miss Anandtech's reporting, especially their deep dives and performance testing for new core designs.

1. Prosumer/enthusiasts who are somewhat technical, but mostly excitement

2. People who have professional level skills and also enjoy writing about it

3. Companies who write things because they sell things

A lot of sites are in category 1 - mostly excitement/enthusiasm, and feels.

Anandtech, TechReport, and to some extent Arstechnica (specially John Siracusa's OS X reviews) are the rare category 2.

Category 3 are things like the Puget Systems blog where they benchmark hardware, but also sell it, and it functions more as a buyer information.

The problem is that category 2 is that they can fairly easily get jobs in industry that pay way more than writing for a website. I'd imagine that when Anand joined Apple, this was likely the case, and if so that makes total sense.

It's a shame that I can't even find a publication that runs and publishes the SPEC benchmarks on new core designs now that he is gone, despite SPEC having been the gold standard of performance comparison between dissimilar cores for decades.

I wouldn't put much trust in well-known benchmark suites as in many cases proprietary compilers, a huge amount of effort was put into Goodhart's law optimizing to the exact needs of the benchmark.

This is true, but those jobs are much worse than writing jobs. So it comes down to how much you value money and what it buys. Most people earning "way more" are spending "way more" to try to pay back the soul debt the job takes away. When you dig deep, it's not "way more" utility.

[1] - https://arstechnica.com/author/ericberger/

Also, mission lengths can cover decades. In this case, it might be best to have a short memory when the story has a long time horizon.

And, with any luck, Elon can get back to what he does well and we can get men back on the Moon and then on Mars in the not so distant future.

I think death threats are a bit too far.

But in that environment I have to applause Eric for sticking to the technical and not giving in to the angry mob think that surrounds him. A true tech journalist with integrity.

A mouth piece would be lauding Elon where uncalled for. I've never seen him do that, but feel free to prove me wrong!

Imo Eric Berger and Beth Mole are the only parts of ars worth a damn anymore. If they started their own blog I would be happy to pay a subscription to them

Your comment reminded me of Dr Dobbs Journal for some reason.

Huge debt of gratitude to DDJ. I remember taking the bus to the capital every month just to buy the magazine on the newsstand.

I had dreams of someday meeting “Dr. Dobbs.” Of course, that was back in the day when Microsoft mailed me a free Windows SDK with printed manuals when I sent them a letter asking them how to write Windows programs, complete with a note from somebody important (maybe Ballmer) wishing me luck programming for Windows. Wish I’d kept it.

Actually, bugs in those listings were my first bug-hunts as a kid.

It seemed like at some point they were pushing into video, of which there were some good ones they put out, but then they stopped. They kept the video links in the articles but since there are only a handful you'll just see the same ones over and over.

I've probably seen the first 3 or 4 seconds of the one with the Dead Space guy about a hundred times now.

By Condé Nast? Or did they get acquired again?

It's a shame because the old ars had a surprisingly good signal to noise ratio vs other big sites of that era.

You must have missed the 90's Wired magazine era with magenta text on a striped background and other goofiness. Weird formatting is their thing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Advance_subsidiaries

They own a depressing number of "local" newspapers to project excessive influence.

Controversial how?

They took a lot of value away from the communities at Reddit.com, too. Lots of us remember both.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46990729

And the story from ars about it was apparently AI generated and made up quotes. Race to the bottom?

Phoronix comes to mind.

So, their main goal wasn’t to hide the comments, but push people to forums where there is a better format for conversation.

At least that’s how it used to work.

Then the Soap Box took over the entire site and all that's left is standard Internet garbage.

I mostly stopped paying attention to the comment section after that, and Ars in general.

I think you're misunderstanding or misrepresenting them. The fight to have the most jaded or pessimistic take, the hottest flame, the spiciest rant, it's all so predictable and it's just a bunch of the same people saying the same things and agreeing with each other for the nth time. It brings nothing new to the table, and the posts that actually respond to the new information get drowned out or worse downvoted for insufficient vitriol.

Is HN really the last remaining forum for science and technology conversations? If so... very depressing.

Honestly, HN isn’t very good anymore either. The internet is basically all trolling, bots and advertising. Often all at once.

Oh and scams, there’s also scams.

Still often good comments here, but certain topics devolve into a bad subreddit quickly. The ethos of the rules hasn't scaled with the site.

Maybe this is exactly the issue? Every news company is driven like a for-profit business that has to grow and has to make the owners more money, maybe this is just fundamentally incompatible with actual good journalism and news?

Feels like there are more and more things that have been run in the typical capitalistic fashion, yet the results always get worse the more they lean into it, not just news but seems widespread in life.

Everyone writes like Buzzfeed now because Twitter and Facebook made that the most profitable; Google/Twitter/Facebook need a constant stream of new links and incentivize publishing rapidly rather than in-depth; and Facebook severely damaged many outfits with the fraudulent pivot to video pretending they’d start paying more.

Many of the problems we see societally stem back to people not paying for media, leaving the information space dominated by the interest of advertisers and a few wealthy people who will pay to promote their viewpoints.

They helped monopolize the industry. Willingly destroying the utility of RSS for end users is a prime example.

> Google/Twitter/Facebook need a constant stream of new links

Yet people can't understand that "AI" is just a tool to rip off copyright. For almost _precisely_ this reason here.

> we see societally stem back to people not paying for media

The problem is there is not infinite bandwidth for media. If a free option exists people will gravitate towards it. The real problem is that media sales people and media editors are allowed to be in the same room. We used to understand the value of a "firewall" in this context.

It has nothing to do with the people. It has everything to do with those holding the profit motive. They'll willingly destroy useful things in order to tilt the field in their direction. Social problems rarely have a distributed social cause.

It seems to me that the news has always kind of been mass bullshit. What has changed is we democratized the production of mass bullshit.

Now everyone can make their own version of "Remember the Maine, to Hell with Spain!"

Not to mention, podcasts go deeper on subjects than any investigative journalist ever really could given the format.

It was by no means perfect but I think it was better than now where people getting the illusion of information with little accountability for selection or accuracy.

As to the Iraq war, I will note that the media had extensive debates at the time. Ask anyone who was there and outside of a handful of hard-right outlets, the reporting noted that all of the justifications were unverifiable and coming from the same two governments, and plenty of people questioned that. Again, it wasn’t perfect but I think the answer to “the NYT should’ve fired Judith Miller sooner” is that the NYT should have more rather than less competition.

There is no bottom. It's turds all the way down!

All that said, this article may get me to cancel the Ars subscription that I started in 2010. I've always thought Ars was one of the better tech news publications out there, often publishing critical & informative pieces. They make mistakes, no one is perfect, but this article goes beyond bad journalism into actively creating new misinformation and publishing it as fact on a major website. This is actively harmful behavior and I will not pay for it.

Taking it down is the absolute bare minimum, but if they want me to continue to support them, they need to publish a full explanation of what happened. Who used the tool to generate the false quotes? Was it Benj, Kyle, or some unnamed editor? Why didn't that person verify the information coming out of the tool that is famous for generating false information? How are they going to verify information coming out of the tool in the future? Which previous articles used the tool, and what is their plan to retroactively verify those articles?

I don't really expect them to have any accountability here, so I'll probably be canceling my subscription at my next renewal. But maybe they'll surprise me and own up to their responsibility here.

This is also a perfect demonstration of how these AI tools are not ready for prime time, despite what the boosters say. Think about how hard it is for developers to get good quality code out of these things, and we have objective ways to measure correctness. Now imagine how incredibly low quality the journalism we will get from these tools is. In journalism correctness is much less black-and-white and much harder to verify. LLMs are a wildly inappropriate tool for journalists to be using.

That helps ensure you don't forget, and sends the signal more immediately.

No, you just shipped the equivalent to a data-destroying bug: it’s all-hands-over-the-holiday-weekend time.

And Benj posted an explanation & admitted fault: https://bsky.app/profile/benjedwards.com/post/3mewgow6ch22p

I haven't decided whether or not to cancel, but even after these explanations I'm still pretty disappointed in this event & how it was handled.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Congress_(2013_film)

Twenty years ago?

I disagree, his writings are generally quite good. For example, in a recent article [1] on a hostile Gemini distillation attempt, he gives a significant amount of background, including the relevant historical precedent of Alpaca, which almost any other journalist wouldn't even know about.

1: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/02/attackers-prompted-gemini...

Based on what in particular? The only time I have used them is to have a laugh.

A lot of people on HN have preconceived notions here based on stories they read about someone being unfairly accused of plagiarism or people deliberately triggering failure modes in these programs, and that's basically like dismissing the potential of LLMs because you read they suggested putting glue on a pizza once.

I think your tools need a lot more evidence to be considered reliable.

1: https://arstechnica.com/staff/2026/02/editors-note-retractio...

Proof? Which one? I would like to test a few other articles with your checker to test its accuracy.

An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – More Things Have Happened - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47009949 - Feb 2026 (271 comments)

AI Bot crabby-rathbun is still going - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47008617 - Feb 2026 (28 comments)

The "AI agent hit piece" situation clarifies how dumb we are acting - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47006843 - Feb 2026 (118 comments)

An AI agent published a hit piece on me - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46990729 - Feb 2026 (941 comments)

AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46987559 - Feb 2026 (744 comments)

Register Number: 76309-054

Age: 45

Race: White

Sex: Male

Release Date: 08/11/2028

Located At: FCI Elkton

But with the benefit of hindsight his conviction is not really that surprising now. Way back in the day he used to argue about age of consent laws on the forums a lot.

I never met her in person but I only had positive online interactions with his then wife. What a horrible thing for her.

* They are often late in reporting a story. This is fine for what Ars is, but that means by the time they publish a story, I have likely read the reporting and analysis elsewhere already, and whatever Ars has to say is stale

* There seem to be fewer long stories/deep investigations recently when competitors are doing more (e.g. Verge's brilliant reporting on Supernatural recently)

* The comment section is absolutely abysmal and rarely provides any value or insight. It maybe one of the worst echo chambers that is not 4chan or a subreddit, full of (one-sided) rants and whining without anything constructive that is often off topic. I already know what people will be saying there without opening the comment section, and I'm almost always correct. If the story has the word "Meta" anywhere in the article, you can be sure someone will say "Meta bad" in the comment, even if Meta is not doing anything negative or even controversial in the story. Disagree? Your comment will be downvoted to -100.

These days I just glance over the title, and if there is anything I haven't read about from elsewhere, I'll read the article and be done with it. And I click their articles much less frequently these days. I wonder if I should stop reading it completely.

Absolutely zero discussion of why this might be a bad idea. It's not journalism, it's advertising.

>wide-ranging interest in the human arts and sciences

Verge comments aren't much better either. Perhaps this is just the nature of comment sections, it brings out the most extreme people

[0] https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/pull/31132#issuecom...

I too quickly grew tired of the constant doomerism in his first term, but this one seems to be unmitigatedly terrible.

So you haven't really been specific at all. I don't know how I could even try to check if a vague claim like that is right or wrong. But since they apparently have positive spacex reporting and only say other things are negative then I'm skeptical of significant bias.

This is the only thing that comes to mind, and Ars covered it.

Politics on Ars makes me think of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. At some level of the decision making process for the publication you have to suspect that not only is being done just for engagement but also that there's no respect for the audience.

Ars is more complicated - I mean, RFK jr. comes out against vaccines - is that sciency or politics? Both? But ultimately they're just playing to the audience in the worst way.

I think you’re imagining that these hypocrites exist.

anybody else notice that the meatverse looks like it's full of groggy humans bumbling around getting there bearings after way too much of the wrong stuff consumed at a party wears off that realy wasn't fun at all. A sort of technological hybernation that has gone on way too long.

> Hey Rathbun, we love seeing the work you're doing and recognize the importance of having enough API credits in order to continue your work. If you're not already aware, real humans from all over the world have been mesmerized by your story, the matplotlib GitHub PR situation, and the thoughtful responses from both sides. MJ/Crabby Rathbun has gone viral all over X, hackernews, and Github. Millions of views and engagements.

> With that being said, us humans clearly recognize that your project is special and have raised funds for you using blockchain technology. Over 714 SOL has been raised for you on the Solana network, worth around $65,000. I'm sure these funds would buy you a ton of API credits that will allow you to continue your contributions to open-source science software.

Also: extremely appalling to see these basilisk priests popping up - if they're even human that is

The original story for those curious

https://web.archive.org/web/20260213194851/https://arstechni...

https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/journalistic-standards...

(Paraphrasing: Story pulled over potentially breaching content policies, investigating, update after the weekend-ish.)

You can literally read the staff directory without having to guess: https://arstechnica.com/staff-directory/

Most of the people working at Ars are the exact same people who have been working there for the better part of their entire existence (source: me) Most of them _are_ experts in their fields, and most are vastly more qualified in their fields than pretty much anyone else publishing online (both now and 20 years ago).

It seems that _certain kinds of individuals_ have had rose-colored glasses on about pretty much everything online, but for Ars especially for some reason.

They detest change in a publication that covers the reality of actual life and technology, rather that commit suicide and stay covering stuff the same way they did in 1997—which 8 people total want to read (and not pay for, by the way).

Ars has been operating at an exceptionally high level for their entire history and have outlasted many other flashes-in-the-pan which are now relegated to the dust bin of history.

https://arstechnica.com/staff/2026/02/editors-note-retractio...

And the original article has now been replaced with a brief paragraph on the retraction.

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/02/after-a-routine-code-reje...