They just aren’t good anymore. And haven’t been for a while.
A number of posts are sensationalized to the point of almost being incorrect. For example, their Okta post about the breach update affecting everyone was portrayed as if it were a third, completely unrelated breach. While Okta’s security practices were shown to be terrible this year, writing misleading articles makes it hard to follow news.
They’ve leaned hard into the “Twitter news gets us clicks” problem, they’ve leaned hard into that for clicks.
For years they’ve made it a point to have some kind of Tesla-bashing (or least Tesla related) article every few days — even 5 years ago Tim Lee basically said it was to drive traffic to the site.
With that said, obviously traffic plays a role. We’re a primarily ad-supported business and so we write more about topics that will generate more clicks. Articles about Tesla generate high click-through rates on our home page. Google News, our primary source of external traffic, also sends us a lot of traffic any time we write about Tesla. So do I write about Tesla for clicks? Guilty as charged.
Icaria@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Ars’ quality dropped badly about 10 years ago, around the same time New Scientist went to shit. A lot of their articles are now uncritical regurgitations of press releases. Even the one guy they had doing really detailed investigative pieces on the videogame industry up and left probably 5 years ago.
Also they never followed through on their promise to give us an everything-but-apple RSS feed.