this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2024
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394
End of the Road - Anandtech has closed down (www.anandtech.com)
submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 217 points 2 months ago (1 children)

And while the AnandTech staff is riding off into the sunset, I am happy to report that the site itself won’t be going anywhere for a while. Our publisher, Future PLC, will be keeping the AnandTech website and its many articles live indefinitely. So that all of the content we’ve created over the years remains accessible and citable.

This is such a big thing. Losing access to content is something we’re seeing en masse and future historians and hobbyists greatly appreciate having historical articles accessible and not lost to the sands of time. I think it would be even better if we could all torrent and archive as well, but accessibility and continued access is appreciated.

[–] [email protected] 99 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Yes but how long until their publisher corporate execs crunch the numbers for the cost of operating the servers and decide it isn't worth it to keep it going?

It sounds like a large crawl should be initiated at archive.ph and archive.org (Wayback Machine) to keep this info available to the public.

[–] [email protected] 64 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Exactly. This is why the internet archive should be a universally publicly-funded endeavor. It's just as important as the world's libraries.

I'm really hoping the internet archive shifts to some distributed P2P type model (IPFS, Tahoe-Lafs etc) where anyone can assign a hard drive as tribute, archive any public webpage on it and it'll be replicated around the world, but still accessible through a single protocol. You can't stop the signal!

[–] [email protected] -5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

universally publicly-funded endeavor

History has always been in the hands of the victors. We've finally created a significant exception. But, status quo society doesn't want the responsibility of reasoning out their own decisions or understanding those of others. They'll believe it best to hand their power back to their oppressors. Even if they believe their oppressors "good", they're choosing to enslave greatness to democratic mediocrity. Anything but personal sacrifice.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

If you're implying that an essential service should be managed by a private company instead of the government, I'd like you to take a look at the other services we have that are privatized... Like Internet providers and healthcare providers. People are dying because saving them is not profitable. And Comcast absolutely will throttle your connection for their own benefit.

If the Internet archive ever became for-profit, it would absolutely ruin the value of it to the public.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Look at Proton, Wikipedia, or the Internet Archive.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

All of which are heavily based on open source software, donations, and in the case of wikipedia, user generated and moderated content.

The solution is not centralization. It's decentralization. A decentralized internet archive could not be held accountable, or taken down, by any individual government. It will remain active and fault tolerant as long as enough users keep enough storage allocated to maintain replication and redundancy. One architected with zero knowledge encryption as the backbone (e.g. IPFS + I2P) could even operate within the jurisdiction of hostile governments.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

Finally, someone with some sense.

Decentralization is one way, the most accessible by far. Proton is an example of another way. Yet another is to never scale.

[–] [email protected] 128 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Finally, for everyone who still needs their technical writing fix, our formidable opposition of the last 27 years and fellow Future brand, Tom’s Hardware

So the actual reason is the parent company doesn't wasn't to run both.

[–] [email protected] 55 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Yeah this is definitely a brand merger in some ways.

I imagine it might be due to profitability, too. I think the rate of articles has slowed down in the last 5 years, and I think losing Ian Cutress's analysis was also tough for their articles.

It feels like a lot of the hardware journalism these days has moved to YouTube, like Gamers Nexus, Hardware Unboxed, TechTechPotato, Moore's Law Is Dead, etc.

I think Chips and Cheese seems to be the biggest site for detailed hardware analysis these days.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

Let's not forget about HotHardware. They're still carrying the torch of detailed hardware analysis as well my beloved NotebookCheck.

[–] [email protected] 43 points 2 months ago (1 children)

But Tom's Hardware is awful.

Any article I've seen from them has either been so low detail it feels like someone used ChatGPT 0.1 to write it, or it's so blatantly just and advertisement for whatever sponsor they're talking about.

Of course, that means AnandTech probably was still decent and since it was decent it cost money to run, so fuck it, let's just see how much we can get nvidia to pay us to post fluff pieces instead.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Yeah it's a shame because there was a time that Toms hardware was so good and often neck and neck with Anandtech in terms of great articles to read, but at some point it became more sensationalist and the line betweens tom's guide and tom's hardware blurred (with tom's guide seeming to take over). There are still nuggets that are okay, but just not like it used to be.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Tom's Hardware wrote plenty of junk back in the day. I remember articles where Tom's Hardware would say "AMD trashes Intel in this benchmark", but the difference was barely measurable. It was like they had a form fill for what to say after showing a graph. If one side was ahead by any margin at all, it trashed the competition.

Anandtech was more sobering, but their website was a mess. Go to any section of the site (storage, gpus, whatever) and product announcements are sorted together with reviews. There are about ten product announcements for every review. When trying to get a comparison of different products for a build, it was hard to track down a useful article.

Neither site had much changed their layout in 20 years, but Tom's Hardware at least makes it easier to find what you want.

[–] [email protected] 60 points 2 months ago (4 children)

Wow, that takes me back. I used to prefer Anandtech to Ars Technica, Hot Hardware, Tom's Hardware, etc.
But I haven't visited any of them in like a decade, so I can see why they might be shutting down.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Anand la shimpi, the founder, left almost a decade ago, and that seems to have weakened it a good bit, then we got YouTube channels like GN and we just blast them into out feeds quickly because we don't care about the specific numbers as much as a broad brush.

I remember 20 years ago when performance really, really mattered, but now things are so fast it's a difference you can't always easily see unless you're trying to run over 4k and the game is jokingly badly optimized.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago

I remember 20 years ago when performance really, really mattered, but now things are so fast it's a difference you can't always easily see

Yea, I remember back in the day a couple years old system would be obviously out of date and painful (IF you weren't just using it for simple stuff like office work) to use. The past 15 years or so things have been just so efficient and quick that I've been extending my hardware refresh cycles more and more.

I just replaced my old maxed out T440p with its 4th gen i7 last year after going strong since 2015

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago

remember 20 years ago when performance really, really mattered

At this point, you could almost just assume next gen CPU is 10% faster than the one that was 10% faster last year.

GPUs are a little more wild, but that's more a side effect of all 3 having wild swings due to hardware changes and driver updates but it's still just a single graph you have to update every few months. Not really enough to run a business on.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

Anand left 10 years ago to the day of the announcement. Was pretty well timed and I doubt it was coincidental.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago

This made me nostalgic, so I just hopped back on techguy.org and logged in again. Member there for 22 years and haven't logged on in a decade, but they still had my little profile picture of Goku saved. Answered somebody's hardware question. I still got it! Lol

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Yeah about the same, I visited /., anadtech, tom's, betanews, etc about daily maybe 20 years ago, but I haven't been to those in a decade for sure, except slashdot I still go there

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago

Lol, I still check out slashdot too - although it's usually a day late with news and the comments aren't anything special. Force of habit I guess.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

I'm in the same boat, in the early days of Android (Galaxy S 1 days) I used to go to their site just as frequently as Tom's Hardware, TechPowerUp, etc. because they were on top of most new customizable ROMs if I remember right.

I haven't had a reason to go back since it has become increasingly more difficult to get a custom ROM on any Galaxy phone, and I almost completely forgot about the site until this announcement.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 2 months ago

End of an era.

Thank you for providing a lot of high quality content for so many years!

[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 months ago (2 children)

I miss sharky extreme. Best forums in the 90s. What ever happened to them...

https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/what-happened-to-sharky-extreme.297956/

Glad they are keeping the forums alive, though! That's something.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Wow I completely forgot that name!

Techreport, Hardocp, Anandtech. All killed by YouTube which is an objectively worse format for technical information.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago

overclock.net lives on

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

And xtremesystems.org :(

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Any reason as to why they closing down???

[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 months ago (1 children)

It's implied that it was a decision by management. If I had to guess, it's related to money and/or the redundancy cause by the same parent company owning both Tom's Hardware and Anandtech.

Kind of unfortunate, since I always thought Anandtech had the better articles, but I guess this also preserves Anandtech's legacy in some ways.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 months ago

Anandtech was more nerdy and technical and I presume less people were reading their articles But also the quality of their content was far superior.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Ian Cutress shared on his YouTube channel that the owners saw it as redundant to Toms Hardware even though Anandtech was far more focused on architecture. He went into some detail about how Anandtech was pushed to become more generalist and consumer oriented, so basically it was redundancy that they themselves created

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Weird, I do not know how I missed this publication entirely because I've been reading technical reviews for a long time.

Edit: Perhaps it's because it's more hardware-based and I am more of a software person.