The Verge is unrecognizable as the tech news site that it was founded as (under the This Is My Next moniker). Two of the top five articles on their site are currently about sports, unsurprising as they are owned by the same parent as SB-Nation. They also have 'authors' whose entire output seems to consist of blogspam summaries of articles on other sites.

The Verge wasn't founded as a tech news site. It was founded as a culture site, with a slant towards tech (because technology is a part of everyday culture).

This has been their message since the very beginning.

That sports article currently featured on the front page? About how tech and social media is changing sports. Just because there's a football doesn't mean its off topic for a 'tech' website. http://www.theverge.com/2015/1/28/7878051/espn-sportscenter-...

The very first long form article they published back in 2011 was about "A new breed of survivalist is wealthy, educated, and plans to ride out 2012 in style". http://www.theverge.com/culture/2011/11/1/2525857/2012-survi...

The Verge has changed in the three years since it launched (everything has) - but it's still the type of site it launched as.

Exactly the same, except with 1/10th the article quality.

There are many times where I've noticed Verge and Polygon post articles on the exact same topics and it doesn't make sense at all since Polygon was originally meant to only be for game industry discussion.

They kinda have identity crisis sometimes. Recently I read a long opinion piece about WWE's Royal Rumble on Polygon, no idea why that's in there.

Stuff like this is what happens when you let metrics drive your vision instead of the other way around.

Which is pretty disappointing since originally their mission statement seemed to be that they wanted to escape that mindset (most of the original team came from Engadget and such).

The goal is to get traffic from facebook/reddit/twitter/etc, not to report unique or relevant things. By blurring the boundaries they create opportunities to link to each other and re-monetize content because both sites have a shot at pulling traffic from social media.

With respect to the business side that makes perfect sense. But as to their original direction when they were creating the distinct Polygon property, it's gone pretty far off-course.

Polygon was interesting when it started, but then they stopped their deep journalism pieces, adulterated the site with non-game content, and hired Ben Kuchera :-(

I think they found out in-depth longread type articles don't guarantee a consistent readership. It's possible to pull off if it's a once a week or twice a week kind of thing, but they were trying to do it as their main content source.

I dunno what happened with Ben - he was pretty enjoyable to read back at Ars Technica, but in the meantime has become downright obnoxious.

Ars had good editors.

Chris Grant left Joystiq to start Polygon shortly after Topolsky and team went to start The Verge.