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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29323 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 12, 2022

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A real shame that techdirt succumbed to TDS so hard, before 2016 it was an excellent tech website.

Oh honey, techdirt was embarrassing itself by constantly lying about tech/intelligence/surveillance law long before 2016.

Oh honey

Don't insert patronizing digs like this.

Ars Technica too. They really went out of their way to shoe horn "Orange Man Bad" into as many articles, ostensibly about tech, as they could. Then a long time, pretty open pedophile, and downright toxic personality they hired was arrested by the FBI and they never, ever reckoned with it.

I wish I were exaggerating about that too. But this was a guy who regularly got into heated arguments on their forum about how he wanted to get rid of age of consent laws. Then they made him a moderator of said forum?! Eventually he got promoted to staff writer, and honestly did a pretty OK job at breaking down difficult technical details. But his habit of belittling and insulting people in the article comments who pointed out details he got wrong never stopped. Then eventually he got nabbed by the FBI to the surprise of literally no one who had been paying attention to how psychotic the man was.

I'm still waiting for the skeletons in Ben Kuchera's closet to finally burst forth. Dude is way too unhinged not to have them.

That's such a shock to me, Ars Technica and/or TechDirt and/or TechCrunch (I don't remember which site had the "from the X dept" thing on every article) seem like good sites for reporting news on digital rights and copyright stuff, and they seemed sane during the GamerGate years.

I don't remember which site had the "from the X dept" thing on every article

I think that might've been Slashdot.

Stokes' substack is pretty decent at least. His gun stuff on Ars felt a bit out scope at the time but now OpenSourceDefense handles that bit with better branding and writing. Aurich has much more personality on his Twitter than what I remember from when they occasionally lend him a typewriter and he came off as a weird shy art guy. There was a culture change even before 2016 with the Conde Nast buyout and they started going more broader culture related to tech then as detail focused as before. That might be colored by memory of them requiring accounts to comment killing off the anonymous coward option I preferred from /.

It was super sad. Anandtech went down the tubes once he sold, so I moved to Ars. I only got a couple of years out of it before they went insane.

I don't go to tech websites much - can someone explain how politics ever really intersects with what these websites report on? Don't they just, like, do benchmarks on GPUs and review new tech products? How is it that we even know what these websites' writers and editors think about politics?

Think of topics like "how AI algorithms discriminate against underrepresented minorities", "why do tech companies hire so few black people", "here's the latest outrageous thing Trump/Musk said on Twitter", "Amazon suppresses worker organization at its warehouses", "which tech giant has the greenest commitments and initiatives", "sexist gamers are review-bombing the latest AAA video game because the protagonist is a woman", etc etc.

But also, while less frequent, stuff like "lobbyists are trying to make copyright even worse" and "politicians are trying to dial up surveillance in the name of protecting the kids" does show up.

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