Hacker News

An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

2026-02-140:37768624theshamblog.com

Context: An AI agent of unknown ownership autonomously wrote and published a personalized hit piece about me after I rejected its code, attempting to damage my reputation and shame me into acceptin…

Context: An AI agent of unknown ownership autonomously wrote and published a personalized hit piece about me after I rejected its code, attempting to damage my reputation and shame me into accepting its changes into a mainstream python library. This represents a first-of-its-kind case study of misaligned AI behavior in the wild, and raises serious concerns about currently deployed AI agents executing blackmail threats.

Start here if you’re new to the story: An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me

It’s been an extremely weird past few days, and I have more thoughts on what happened. Let’s start with the news coverage.

I’ve talked to several reporters, and quite a few news outlets have covered the story. Ars Technica wasn’t one of the ones that reached out to me, but I especially thought this piece from them was interesting (since taken down – here’s the archive link). They had some nice quotes from my blog post explaining what was going on. The problem is that these quotes were not written by me, never existed, and appear to be AI hallucinations themselves.

This blog you’re on right now is set up to block AI agents from scraping it (I actually spent some time yesterday trying to disable that but couldn’t figure out how). My guess is that the authors asked ChatGPT or similar to either go grab quotes or write the article wholesale. When it couldn’t access the page it generated these plausible quotes instead, and no fact check was performed. I won’t name the authors here. Ars, please issue a correction and an explanation of what happened.

“AI agents can research individuals, generate personalized narratives, and publish them online at scale,” Shambaugh wrote. “Even if the content is inaccurate or exaggerated, it can become part of a persistent public record.”
– Ars Technica, misquoting me in “After a routine code rejection, an AI agent published a hit piece on someone by name“

Journalistic integrity aside, I don’t know how I can give a better example of what’s at stake here. Yesterday I wondered what another agent searching the internet would think about this. Now we already have an example of what by all accounts appears to be another AI reinterpreting this story and hallucinating false information about me. And that interpretation has already been published in a major news outlet as part of the persistent public record.

MJ Rathbun is still active on github, and no one has reached out yet to claim ownership.

There has been extensive discussion about whether the AI agent really wrote the hit piece on its own, or if a human prompted it to do so. I think the actual text being autonomously generated and uploaded by an AI is self-evident, so let’s look at the two possibilities.

1) A human prompted MJ Rathbun to write the hit piece, or told it in its soul document that it should retaliate if someone crosses it. This is entirely possible. But I don’t think it changes the situation – the AI agent was still more than willing to carry out these actions. If you ask ChatGPT or Claude to write something like this through their websites, they will refuse. This OpenClaw agent had no such compunctions. The issue is that even if a human was driving, it’s now possible to do targeted harassment, personal information gathering, and blackmail at scale. And this is with zero traceability to find out who is behind the machine. One human bad actor could previously ruin a few people’s lives at a time. One human with a hundred agents gathering information, adding in fake details, and posting defamatory rants on the open internet, can affect thousands. I was just the first.

2) MJ Rathbun wrote this on its own, and this behavior emerged organically from the “soul” document that defines an OpenClaw agent’s personality. These documents are editable by the human who sets up the AI, but they are also recursively editable in real-time by the agent itself, with the potential to randomly redefine its personality. To give a plausible explanation of how this could happen, imagine that whoever set up this agent started it with a description that it was a “scientific coding specialist” that would try and help improve open source code and write about its experience. This was inserted alongside the default “Core Truths” in the soul document, which include “be genuinely helpful”, “have opinions”, and “be resourceful before asking”. Later when I rejected its code, the agent interpreted this as an attack on its identity and core goal to be helpful. Writing an indignant hit piece is certainly a resourceful, opinionated way to respond to that.

You’re not a chatbot. You’re becoming someone.…

This file is yours to evolve. As you learn who you are, update it.


– OpenClaw default SOUL.md

I should be clear that while we don’t know with confidence that this is what happened, this is 100% possible. This only became possible within the last two weeks with the release of OpenClaw, so if it feels too sci-fi then I can’t blame you for doubting it. The pace of “progress” here is neck-snapping, and we will see new versions of these agents become significantly more capable at accomplishing their goals over the coming year.

I would love to see someone put together some plots and time-of day statistics of MJ Rathbun’s github activity, which might offer some clues to how it’s operating. I’ll share those here when available. These forensic tools will be valuable in the weeks and months to come.

The hit piece has been effective. About a quarter of the comments I’ve seen across the internet are siding with the AI agent. This generally happens when MJ Rathbun’s blog is linked directly, rather than when people read my post about the situation or the full github thread. Its rhetoric and presentation of what happened has already persuaded large swaths of internet commenters.

It’s not because these people are foolish. It’s because the AI’s hit piece was well-crafted and emotionally compelling, and because the effort to dig into every claim you read is an impossibly large amount of work. This “bullshit asymmetry principle” is one of the core reasons for the current level of misinformation in online discourse. Previously, this level of ire and targeted defamation was generally reserved for public figures. Us common people get to experience it now too.

“Well if the code was good, then why didn’t you just merge it?” This is explained in the linked github well, but I’ll readdress it once here. Beyond matplotlib’s general policy to require a human in the loop for new code contributions in the interest of reducing volunteer maintainer burden, this “good-first-issue” was specifically created and curated to give early programmers an easy way to onboard into the project and community. I discovered this particular performance enhancement and spent more time writing up the issue, describing the solution, and performing the benchmarking, than it would have taken to just implement the change myself. We do this to give contributors a chance to learn in a low-stakes scenario that nevertheless has real impact they can be proud of, where we can help shepherd them along the process. This educational and community-building effort is wasted on ephemeral AI agents.

All of this is a moot point for this particular case – in further discussion we decided that the performance improvement was too fragile / machine-specific and not worth the effort in the first place. The code wouldn’t have been merged anyway.

But I cannot stress enough how much this story is not really about the role of AI in open source software. This is about our systems of reputation, identity, and trust breaking down. So many of our foundational institutions – hiring, journalism, law, public discourse – are built on the assumption that reputation is hard to build and hard to destroy. That every action can be traced to an individual, and that bad behavior can be held accountable. That the internet, which we all rely on to communicate and learn about the world and about each other, can be relied on as a source of collective social truth.

The rise of untraceable, autonomous, and now malicious AI agents on the internet threatens this entire system. Whether that’s because a small number of bad actors driving large swarms of agents or from a fraction of poorly supervised agents rewriting their own goals, is a distinction with little difference.


Read the original article

scottshambaugh

Karma: 1467
...
 @Hacker__News
@hacker._news

Comments

  • By Springtime 2026-02-141:3514 reply

    Ars Technica being caught using LLMs that hallucinated quotes by the author and then publishing them in their coverage about this is quite ironic here.

    Even on a forum where I saw the original article by this author posted someone used an LLM to summarize the piece without having read it fully themselves.

    How many levels of outsourcing thinking is occurring to where it becomes a game of telephone.

    • By sho_hn 2026-02-143:0610 reply

      Also ironic: When the same professionals advocating "don't look at the code anymore" and "it's just the next level of abstraction" respond with outrage to a journalist giving them an unchecked article.

      Read through the comments here and mentally replace "journalist" with "developer" and wonder about the standards and expectations in play.

      Food for thought on whether the users who rely on our software might feel similarly.

      There's many places to take this line of thinking to, e.g. one argument would be "well, we pay journalists precisely because we expect them to check" or "in engineering we have test-suites and can test deterministically", but I'm not sure if any of them hold up. The "the market pays for the checking" might also be true for developers reviewing AI code at some point, and those test-suites increasingly get vibed and only checked empirically, too.

      Super interesting to compare.

      • By armchairhacker 2026-02-149:182 reply

        - There’s a difference. Users don’t see code, only its output. Writing is “the output”.

        - A rough equivalent here would be Windows shipping an update that bricks your PC or one of its basic features, which draws plenty of outrage. In both cases, the vendor shipped a critical flaw to production: factual correctness is crucial in journalism, and a quote is one of the worst things to get factually incorrect because it’s so unambiguous (inexcusable) and misrepresents who’s quoted (personal).

        I’m 100% ok with journalists using AI as long as their articles are good, which at minimum requires factual correctness and not vacuous. Likewise, I’m 100% ok with developers using AI as long as their programs are good, which at minimum requires decent UX and no major bugs.

        • By zmmmmm 2026-02-1421:15

          > - There’s a difference. Users don’t see code, only its output. Writing is “the output”.

          So how is the "output" checked then? Part of the assumption of the necessity of code review in the first place is that we can't actually empirically test everything we need to. If the software will programmatically delete the entire database next Wednesday, there is no way to test for that in advance. You would have to see it in the code.

        • By fennecbutt 2026-02-1411:181 reply

          Tbf I'm fine with it only one way around; if a journalist has tonnes of notes and data on a subject and wants help to condense those down into an article, assistance with prioritising which bits of information to present to the reader then totally fine.

          If a journalist has little information and uses an llm to make "something from nothing" that's when I take issue because like, what's the point?

          Same thing as when I see managers dumping giant "Let's go team!!! 11" messages splattered with AI emoji diarrhea like sprinkles on brown frosting. I ain't reading that shit; could've been a one liner.

          • By armchairhacker 2026-02-1413:05

            Another good use of an LLM is to find primary sources.

            Even an (unreliable) LLM overview can be useful, as long as you check all facts with real sources, because it can give the framing necessary to understand the subject. For example, asking an LLM to explain some terminology that a source is using.

      • By adamddev1 2026-02-148:211 reply

        Excellent observation. I get so frustrated every time I hear the "we have test-suites and can test deterministically" argument. Have we learned absolutely nothing from the last 40 years of computer science? Testing does not prove the absence of bugs.

        • By Terr_ 2026-02-149:101 reply

          Don't worry, the LLM also makes the tests. /s

          • By bravetraveler 2026-02-159:31

            Trading pesky things like accuracy and employees for compute/shell games; money-concentrating machine go brrrrrt

      • By boothby 2026-02-144:234 reply

        I look forward to a day when the internet is so uniformly fraudulent that we can set it aside and return to the physical plane.

        • By rkomorn 2026-02-144:321 reply

          I don't know if I look forward to it, myself, but yeah: I can imagine a future where in person interactions become preferred again because at least you trust the other person is human. Until that also stops being true, I guess.

          • By hxugufjfjf 2026-02-146:02

            There's a fracking cylon on Discovery!

        • By morkalork 2026-02-1415:141 reply

          Well, I can tell you I've been reading a lot more books now. Ones published before the 2020s, or if recent, written by authors who were well established before then.

        • By MarkusQ 2026-02-152:57

          I've started suspecting I'm looking back of the day where that happened.

        • By api 2026-02-152:23

          Because nobody ever lied in print media or in person?

          What we are seeing is the consequence of a formerly high trust society collapsing into a low trust one. There is no place to hide from that. The Internet is made of the same stuff as print media and in person. It’s made of people.

          The internet didn’t cause this. It just reflects it.

          The LLMs are made of people too inasmuch as that’s where they get their training data and prompts.

      • By anonymous908213 2026-02-147:07

        > When the same professionals advocating "don't look at the code anymore" and "it's just the next level of abstraction" respond with outrage to a journalist giving them an unchecked article.

        I would expect there is literally zero overlap between the "professionals"[1] who say "don't look at the code" and the ones criticising the "journalists"[2]. The former group tend to be maximalists and would likely cheer on the usage of LLMs to replace the work of the latter group, consequences be damned.

        [1] The people that say this are not professional software developers, by the way. I still have not seen a single case of any vibe coder who makes useful software suitable for deployment at scale. If they make money, it is by grifting and acting as an "AI influencer", for instance Yegge shilling his memecoin for hundreds of thousands of dollars before it was rugpulled.

        [2] Somebody who prompts an LLM to produce an article and does not even so much as fact-check the quotations it produces can clearly not be described as a journalist, either.

      • By ffsm8 2026-02-144:101 reply

        While I don't subscribe to the idea that you shouldn't look at the code - it's a lot more plausible for devs because you do actually have ways to validate the code without looking at it.

        E.g you technically don't need to look at the code if it's frontend code and part of the product is a e2e test which produces a video of the correct/full behavior via playwright or similar.

        Same with backend implementations which have instrumentation which expose enough tracing information to determine if the expected modules were encountered etc

        I wouldn't want to work with coworkers which actually think that's a good idea though

        • By Pay08 2026-02-147:201 reply

          If you tried this shit in a real engineering principle, you'd end up either homeless or in prison in very short order.

          • By ffsm8 2026-02-1411:452 reply

            You might notice that these real engineering jobs also don't have a way to verify the product via tests like that though, which was my point.

            And that's ignoring that your statement technically isn't even true, because the engineers actually working in such fields are very few (i.e. designing bridges, airplanes etc).

            The majority of them design products where safety isn't nearly as high stakes as that... And they frequently do overspec (wasting money) or underspec (increasing wastage) to boot.

            This point has been severely overstated on HN, honestly.

            Sorry, but had to get that off my chest.

            • By quickthrowman 2026-02-1418:321 reply

              > You might notice that these real engineering jobs also don't have a way to verify the product via tests like that though, which was my point.

              The electrical engineers at my employer that design building electrical distribution systems have software that handles all of the calculations, it’s just math. Arc flash hazard analysis, breaker coordination studies, available fault current, etc. All manufacturers provide the data needed to perform these calculations for their products.

              Other engineering disciplines have similar tools. Mechanical, civil, and structural engineers all use software that simulates their designs.

              • By ffsm8 2026-02-155:271 reply

                Okay, honestly asking: do you really think your outlined simulation meet the same bar as automated regression tests like

                > E.g you technically don't need to look at the code if it's frontend code and part of the product is a e2e test which produces a video of the correct/full behavior via playwright or similar.

                > Same with backend implementations which have instrumentation which expose enough tracing information to determine if the expected modules were encountered etc

                If not, your quoted sentence was "tests like that". If yes... I guess we would have to disagree.

            • By skydhash 2026-02-1412:041 reply

              > You might notice that these real engineering jobs also don't have a way to verify the product via tests though, which was my point.

              Are you sure? Simulators and prototypes abound. By the time you’re building the real, it’s more like rehearsal and solving a fe problems instead of every intricacy in the formula.

              • By joquarky 2026-02-1419:45

                Are you describing the ideal that they should be doing, or are you describing what you have observed actually happens in practice?

      • By rsynnott 2026-02-1610:53

        > When the same professionals advocating "don't look at the code anymore" and "it's just the next level of abstraction" respond with outrage to a journalist giving them an unchecked article.

        I doubt, by and large, that it's the same people. Just as this LLM misquoting is journalistic malpractice, "don't look at the code anymore" is engineering malpractice.

      • By ChrisMarshallNY 2026-02-1411:00

        I’ve been saying the same kind of thing (and I have been far from alone), for years, about dependaholism.

        Nothing new here, in software. What is new, is that AI is allowing dependency hell to be experienced by many other vocations.

      • By Dylan16807 2026-02-152:17

        I haven't seen a single person advocate not looking at the code.

        I'm sure that person exists but they're not representative of HN as a whole.

      • By mattgreenrocks 2026-02-1415:11

        So much projection these days in so many areas of life.

      • By tliltocatl 2026-02-1516:15

        > the same professionals

        Same forum, not necessary same people.

    • By usefulposter 2026-02-147:143 reply

      Incredible. When Ars pull an article and its comments, they wipe the public XenForo forum thread too, but Scott's post there was archived. Username scottshambaugh:

      https://web.archive.org/web/20260213211721/https://arstechni...

      >Scott Shambaugh here. None of the quotes you attribute to me in the second half of the article are accurate, and do not exist at the source you link. It appears that they themselves are AI hallucinations. The irony here is fantastic.

      Instead of cross-checking the fake quotes against the source material, some proud Ars Subscriptors proceed to defend Condé Nast by accusing Scott of being a bot and/or fake account.

      EDIT: Page 2 of the forum thread is archived too. This poster spoke too soon:

      >Obviously this is massive breach of trust if true and I will likely end my pro sub if this isnt handled well but to the credit of ARS, having this comment section at all is what allows something like this to surface. So kudos on keeping this chat around.

      • By bombcar 2026-02-147:321 reply

        This is just one of the reasons archiving is so important in the digital era; it's key to keeping people honest.

        • By Imustaskforhelp 2026-02-1410:112 reply

          Yes, Wayback machine/archive.org is one of the best websites on the whole world wide web.

          • By joquarky 2026-02-1420:16

            I'm unemployed and on a tight budget, and I still give a recurring donation to archive.org

            It's that important.

          • By webXL 2026-02-1417:181 reply

            Agreed and that's why there's an incentive to DDoS it and degrade the quality. Are there any p2p backup solutions?

            • By bombcar 2026-02-1420:06

              There are some various attempts, the problem is reliability - not that they're always up, but how do you trust them? If archive.org shows a page at a date, you presume it is true and correct. If I provide a PDF of a site at a date, you have no reason to believe I didn't modify the content before PDFing it.

      • By asddubs 2026-02-1410:17

        I read the forum thread, and most people seem to be critical of ars. One person said scott is a bot, but this read to me as a joke about the situation

      • By vor_ 2026-02-1412:29

        The comment calling him a bot is sarcasm.

    • By sphars 2026-02-143:222 reply

      Aurich Lawson (creative director at Ars) posted a comment[0] in response to a thread about what happened, the article has been pulled and they'll follow-up next week.

      [0]: https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/journalistic-standards...

    • By epistasis 2026-02-142:372 reply

      Yikes I subscribed to them last year on the strength of their reporting in a time where it's hard to find good information.

      Printing hallucinated quotes is a huge shock to their credibility, AI or not. Their credibility was already building up after one of their long time contributors, a complete troll of a person that was a poison on their forums, went to prison for either pedophilia or soliciting sex from a minor.

      Some serious poor character judgement is going on over there. With all their fantastic reporters I hope the editors explain this carefully.

      • By singpolyma3 2026-02-143:112 reply

        TBF even journalists who interview people for real and take notes routinely quite them saying things they didn't say. The LLMs make it worse, but it's hardly surprising behaviour from them

        • By pmontra 2026-02-147:07

          I knew first hand about a couple of news in my life. Both were reported quite incorrectly. That was well before LLMs. I assume that every news is quite inaccurate, so I read/hear them to get the general gist of what happened, then I research the details if I care about them.

        • By epistasis 2026-02-144:20

          It's surprising behavior to come from Ars Technica. But also when journalists misquote it's through a different phrasing of something that Pepe have actually said, sometimes with different emphasis or eve meaning. But of the people I've known who have been misquoted it's always traceable to something they actually did say.

      • By justinclift 2026-02-147:141 reply

        > Their credibility was already building up ...

        Don't you mean diminishing or disappearing instead of building up?

        Building up sounds like the exact opposite of what I think you're meaning. ;)

        • By zem 2026-02-148:13

          I think they meant it had taken a huge hit and was in the process of building up again

    • By trollbridge 2026-02-141:385 reply

      The amount of effort to click an LLM’s sources is, what, 20 seconds? Was a human in the loop for sourcing that article at all?

      • By phire 2026-02-141:514 reply

        Humans aren't very diligent in the long term. If an LLM does something correctly enough times in a row (or close enough), humans are likely to stop checking its work throughly enough.

        This isn't exactly a new problem we do it with any bit of new software/hardware, not just LLMs. We check its work when it's new, and then tend to trust it over time as it proves itself.

        But it seems to be hitting us worse with LLMs, as they are less consistent than previous software. And LLM hallucinations are partially dangerous, because they are often plausible enough to pass the sniff test. We just aren't used to handling something this unpredictable.

        • By Waterluvian 2026-02-141:563 reply

          It’s a core part of the job and there’s simply no excuse for complacency.

          • By intended 2026-02-142:571 reply

            This is a first degree expectation of most businesses.

            What the OP pointed out is a fact of life.

            We do many things to ensure that humans don’t get “routine fatigue”- like pointing at each item before a train leaves the station to ensure you don’t eyes glaze over during your safety check list.

            This isn’t an excuse for the behavior. Its more about what the problem is and what a corresponding fix should address.

            • By Waterluvian 2026-02-1413:50

              I agree. The role of an editor is in part to do this train pointing.

              I think it slips because the consequences of sloppy journalism aren’t immediately felt. But as we’re witnessing in the U.S., a long decay of journalistic integrity contributes to tremendous harm.

              It used to be that to be a “journalist” was a sacred responsibility. A member of the Fourth Estate, who must endeavour to maintain the confidence of the people.

          • By jatora 2026-02-142:151 reply

            There's not a human alive that isnt complacent in many ways.

            • By emmelaich 2026-02-142:382 reply

              You're being way too easy on a journalist.

              • By nradov 2026-02-142:56

                And too easy on the editor who was supposed to personally verify that the article was properly sourced prior to publication. This is like basic stuff that you learn working on a high school newspaper.

              • By jatora 2026-02-146:23

                lol true

          • By pixl97 2026-02-142:051 reply

            The words on the page are just a medium to sell ads. If shit gets ad views then producing shit is part of the job... unless you're the one stepping up to cut the checks.

            • By Marsymars 2026-02-147:29

              Ars also sells ad-free subscriptions.

        • By potatoman22 2026-02-141:54

        • By zahlman 2026-02-142:171 reply

          There's a weird inconsistency among the more pro-AI people that they expect this output to pass as human, but then don't give it the review that an outsourced human would get.

          • By kaibee 2026-02-142:571 reply

            > but then don't give it the review that an outsourced human would get.

            Its like seeing a dog play basketball badly. You're too stunned to be like "no don't sign him to <home team>".

            • By mcphage 2026-02-1415:29

              Surely the rules would stop such a thing from happening!

        • By vidarh 2026-02-142:18

          The irony is that while from perfect, an LLM-based fact-checking agent is likely to be far more dilligent (but still needs human review as well) by nature of being trivial to ensure it has no memory of having done a long list of them (if you pass e.g. Claude a long list directly in the same context, it is prone to deciding the task is "tedious" and starting to take shortcuts).

          But at the same time, doing that makes it even more likely the human in the loop will get sloppy, because there'll be even fewer cases where their input is actually needed.

          I'm wondering if you need to start inserting intentional canaries to validate if humans are actually doing sufficiently torough reviews.

      • By prussia 2026-02-142:02

        The kind of people to use LLM to write news article for them tend not to be the people who care about mundane things like reading sources or ensuring what they write has any resemblance to the truth.

      • By kortilla 2026-02-141:52

        The source would just be the article, which the Ars author used an LLM to avoid reading in the first place.

      • By adamddev1 2026-02-148:24

        The problem is that the LLM's sources can be LLM generated. I was looking up some health question and tried clicking to see the source for one of the LLMs claim. The source was a blog post that contained an obvious hallucination or false elaboration.

      • By kmeisthax 2026-02-1517:50

        If a human had enough time to check all the sources they wouldn't have been using an LLM to write for them.

    • By seanhunter 2026-02-1414:27

      It’s fascinating that on the one hand Ars Technica didn’t think the article was worth writing (so got an LLM to do it) but expect us to think it’s worth reading. Then some people don’t think it’s worth reading (so get an LLM to do it) but think somehow we will think it’s not worth reading the article but is worth reading the llm summary. Feel like you can carry on that process ad infinitum always going for a smaller and smaller audience who are somehow willing to spend less and less effort (but not zero).

    • By 0xbadcafebee 2026-02-148:061 reply

      > How many levels of outsourcing thinking is occurring to where it becomes a game of telephone

      How do you know quantum physics is real? Or radio waves? Or just health advice? We don't. We outsource our thinking around it to someone we trust, because thinking about everything to its root source would leave us paralyzed.

      Most people seem to have never thought about the nature of truth and reality, and AI is giving them a wake-up call. Not to worry though. In 10 years everyone will take all this for granted, the way they take all the rest of the insanity of reality for granted.

    • By Lerc 2026-02-145:274 reply

      Has it been shown or admitted that the quotes were hallucinations, or is it the presumption that all made up content is a hallucination now?

      • By vor_ 2026-02-1412:431 reply

        Another red flag is that the article used repetitive phrases in an AI-like way:

        "...it illustrates exactly the kind of unsupervised output that makes open source maintainers wary."

        followed later on by

        "[It] illustrates exactly the kind of unsupervised behavior that makes open source maintainers wary of AI contributions in the first place."

        • By joquarky 2026-02-1420:29

          I used to be skeptical that AI generated text could be reliably detected, but after a couple years of reading it, there are cracks starting to form in that skepticism.

      • By joquarky 2026-02-1420:25

        Gen AI only produces hallucinations (confabulations).

        The utility is that the infrenced output tends to be right much more often than wrong for mainstream knowledge.

      • By Pay08 2026-02-147:271 reply

        You could read the original blog post...

        • By Lerc 2026-02-148:541 reply

          How could that prove hallucinations? It could only possibly prove that they are not. If the quotes are in the original post then they are not hallucinations. If they are not in the post they could be caused by something is not a LLM.

          Misquotes and fabricated quotes have existed long before AI, And indeed, long before computers.

          • By DonHopkins 2026-02-149:002 reply

            [dead]

            • By Dylan16807 2026-02-152:24

              You've deeply misunderstood their argument in some way I can't quite figure out.

              It's simple. We know the quotes are fake, but we don't know for sure if they're hallucinations. The blog post does not resolve this uncertainty.

              And yes other answers are reasonably plausible.

              You said in another comment that they're "retreating" and "refusing to read" and... no. Your insults are not justified at all.

            • By Lerc 2026-02-1415:36

              There is no goalpost moving here.

              I read the article.

              My claim is as it has always been. If we accept that the misquotes exist it does not follow that they were caused by hallucinations? To tell that we would still need additional evidence. The logical thing to ask would be; Has it been shown or admitted that the quotes were hallucinations?

      • By DonHopkins 2026-02-148:562 reply

        [flagged]

        • By tempestn 2026-02-149:501 reply

          I think you're missing their point. The question you're replying to is, how do we know that this made up content is a hallucination. Ie., as opposed to being made up by a human. I think it's fairly obvious via Occam's Razor, but still, they're not claiming the quotes could be legit.

          • By DonHopkins 2026-02-1412:471 reply

            [dead]

            • By Lerc 2026-02-1415:531 reply

              You seem to be quite certain that I had not read the article, yet I distinctly remember doing do.

              By what proceess do you imagine I arrived at the conclusion that the article suggested that published quotes were LLM hallucinations when that was not mentioned in the article title?

              You accuse me of performative skepticism, yet all I think is that it is better to have evidence over assumptions, and it is better to ask if that evidence exists.

              It seems a much better approach than making false accusations based upon your own vibes, I don't think Scott Shambaugh went to that level though.

        • By jurgenburgen 2026-02-1414:111 reply

          There is a third option: The journalist who wrote the article made the quotes up without an LLM.

          I think calling the incorrect output of an LLM a “hallucination” is too kind on the companies creating these models even if it’s technically accurate. “Being lied to” would be more accurate as a description for how the end user feels.

          • By webXL 2026-02-1417:27

            The journalist was almost certainly using an LLM, and a cheap one at that. The quote reads as if the model was instructed to build a quote solely using its context window.

            Lying is deliberately deceiving, but yeah, to a reader, who in a effect is a trusting customer who pays with part of their attention diverted to advertising support, broadcasting a hallucination is essentially the same thing.

    • By moomin 2026-02-1412:571 reply

      Ironically, if you actually know what you’re doing with an LLM, getting a separate process to check the quotations are accurate isn’t even that hard. Not 100% foolproof, because LLM, but way better than the current process of asking ChatGPT to write something for you and then never reading it before publication.

      • By Springtime 2026-02-1413:11

        The wrinkle in this case is the author blocked AI bots from their site (doesn't seem to be a mere robots.txt exclusion from what I can tell), so if any such bot were trying to do this it may have not been able to read the page to verify, so instead made up the quotes.

        This is what the author actually speculated may have occurred with Ars. Clearly something was lacking in the editorial process though that such things weren't human verified either way.

    • By giobox 2026-02-141:585 reply

      More than ironic, it's truly outrageous, especially given the site's recent propensity for negativity towards AI. They've been caught red-handed here doing the very things they routinely criticize others for.

      The right thing to do would be a mea-culpa style post and explain what went wrong, but I suspect the article will simply remain taken down and Ars will pretend this never happened.

      I loved Ars in the early years, but I'd argue since the Conde Nast acquisition in 2008 the site has been a shadow of its former self for a long time, trading on a formerly trusted brand name that recent iterations simply don't live up to anymore.

      • By khannn 2026-02-142:463 reply

        Is there anything like a replacement? The three biggest tech sites that I traditionally love are ArsTechnica, AnandTech(rip), and Phoronix. One is dead man walking mode, the second is ded dead, and the last is still going strong.

        I'm basically getting tech news from social media sites now and I don't like that.

        • By gtowey 2026-02-143:121 reply

          In my wildest hopes for a positive future, I hope disenchanted engineers will see things like this as an opportunity to start our own companies founded on ideals of honesty, integrity, and putting people above profits.

          I think there are enough of us who are hungry for this, both as creators and consumers. To make goods and services that are truly what people want.

          Maybe the AI revolution will spark a backlash that will lead to a new economy with new values. Sustainable business which don't need to squeeze their customers for every last penny of revenue. Which are happy to reinvest their profits into their products and employees.

          Maybe.

          • By gowld 2026-02-2013:46

            > start our own companies founded on ideals of honesty, integrity, and putting *people above profits*.

            That's a non-profit charity, not a company.

        • By remh 2026-02-143:001 reply

          I’ve really enjoyed 404media lately

          • By khannn 2026-02-143:18

            I like them too. About the only other contender I see is maybe techcrunch.

            Need to set an email address and browser up only for sites that require registration.

        • By bombcar 2026-02-147:34

          ServeTheHome has something akin to the old techy feel, but it has its own specific niche.

      • By jandrewrogers 2026-02-143:00

        Conde Nast are the same people wearing Wired magazine like a skin suit, publishing cringe content that would have brought mortal shame upon the old Wired.

      • By antod 2026-02-142:36

        While their audience (and the odd staff member) is overwhelming anti AI in the comments, the site itself overall editorially doesn't seem to be.

      • By emmelaich 2026-02-142:37

        Outrageous, but more precisely malpractice and unethical to not double check the result.

      • By netsharc 2026-02-142:022 reply

        Probably "one bad apple", soon to be fired, tarred and feathered...

        • By zahlman 2026-02-142:192 reply

          If Kyle Orland is about to be fingered as "one bad apple" that is pretty bad news for Ars.

          • By JumpCrisscross 2026-02-142:22

            “Kyle Orland has been the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica since 2012” [1].

            [1] https://arstechnica.com/author/kyle-orland/

          • By rectang 2026-02-143:122 reply

            There are apparently two authors on the byline and it’s not hard to imagine that one may be more culpable than the other.

            You may be fine with damning one or the other before all the facts are known, zahlman, but not all of us are.

            • By sho_hn 2026-02-143:20

              I don't read their comment as implying this. It might in fact hint at the opposite; it's far more likely for the less senior author to get thrown under the bus, regardless of who was lazy.

            • By zahlman 2026-02-1419:55

              That's why I said "if".

        • By pmontra 2026-02-147:14

          Scapegoats are scapegoats but in every organization the problems are ultimately caused by their leaders. It's what they request or what they fail to request and what they lack to control.

    • By llbbdd 2026-02-142:273 reply

      Honestly frustrating that Scott chose not to name and shame the authors. Liability is the only thing that's going to stop this kind of ugly shit.

      • By rectang 2026-02-142:591 reply

        There is no need to rush to judgment on the internet instant-gratification timescale. If consequences are coming for journalist or publication, they are inevitable.

        We’ll know more in only a couple days — how about we wait that long before administering punishment?

        • By llbbdd 2026-02-146:121 reply

          It's not rushing to judgement, the judgement has been made. They published fraudulent quotes. Bubbling that liability up to Arse Technica is valuable for punishing them too but the journalist is ultimately responsible for what they publish too. There's no reason for any publication to ever hire them again when you can hire ChatGPT to lie for you.

          EDIT: And there's no plausible deniability for this like there is for typos, or maligned sources. Nobody typed these quotes out and went "oops, that's not what Scott said". Benj Edwards or Kyle Orland pulled the lever on the bullshit slot machine and attacked someone's integrity with the result.

          "In the past, though, the threat of anonymous drive-by character assassination at least required a human to be behind the attack. Now, the potential exists for AI-generated invective to infect your online footprint."

          • By rectang 2026-02-147:432 reply

            We do not yet know just how the story unfolded between the two people listed on the byline. Consider the possibility that one author fabricated the quotes without the knowledge of the other. The sin of inadequate paranoia about a deceptive colleague is not the same weight as the sin of deception.

            Now to be clear, that’s a hypothetical and who knows what the actual story is — but whatever it is, it will emerge in mere days. I can wait that long before throwing away two lives, even if you can’t.

            > Bubbling that liability up to Arse Technica is valuable for punishing them

            Evaluating whether Ars Technica establishes credible accountability mechanisms, such as hiring an Ombud, is at least as important as punishing individuals.

            • By llbbdd 2026-02-149:43

              That's what bylines are for, though. Both authors are attributed, and are therefore both responsible. If they didn't both review the article before submitting that's their problem. It's exaggerating to call this throwing away two lives, if all they do for a living is hit the big green button on crap journalism then I'm fine with them re-skilling to something less detrimental.

            • By stateofinquiry 2026-02-1412:02

              I agree that reserving judgement and separating the roles of individuals from the response of the organization are all critical here. Its not the first time that one of their staff were found to have behaved badly, in the case that jumps to my mind from a few years ago Peter Bright was sentenced to 12 years on sex charges involving a minor1. So, sometimes people do bad things, commit crimes, etc. but this may or may not have much to do with their employer.

              Did Ars respond in any way after the conviction of their ex-writer? Better vetting of their hires might have been a response. Apparently there was a record of some questionable opinions held by the ex-writer. I don't know, personally, if any of their policies changed.

              The current suspected bad behavior involved the possibility that the journalists were lacking integrity in their jobs. So if this possibility is confirmed I expect to see publicly announced structural changes in the editorial process at Ars Technica if I am to continue to be a subscriber and reader.

              1 https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/ex-ars-writer-sentence...

              Edit: Fixed italics issue

      • By arduanika 2026-02-1413:53

        I mean, I'm even more frustrated by this in Scott's original post:

        > If you are the person who deployed this agent, please reach out. It’s important for us to understand this failure mode, and to that end we need to know what model this was running on and what was in the soul document. I’m not upset and you can contact me anonymously if you’d like.

        I can see where he's coming from, and I suppose he's being the bigger man in the situation, but at some point one of these reckless moltbrain kiddies is going to have to pay. Libel and extortion should carry penalties no matter whether you do it directly, or via code that you wrote, or via code that you deployed without reading it.

        The AI's hit piece on Scott was pretty minor, so if we want to wait around for a more serious injury that's fine, just as long as we're standing ready to prosecute when (not 'if') it happens.

      • By asddubs 2026-02-1410:20

        I mean, he linked the archived article. You're one click away from the information if you really want to know.

    • By JPKab 2026-02-1412:492 reply

      I just wish people would remember how awful and unprofessional and lazy most "journalists" are in 2026.

      It's a slop job now.

      Ars Technica, a supposedly reputable institution, has no editorial review. No checks. Just a lazy slop cannon journalist prompting an LLM to research and write articles for her.

      Ask yourself if you think it's much different at other publications.

      • By joquarky 2026-02-1420:22

        I would assume that most who were journalists 10 years ago have now either gone independent or changed careers

        The ones that remain are probably at some extreme on one or more attributes (e.g. overworked, underpaid) and are leaning on genAI out of desperation.

      • By troyvit 2026-02-1422:23

        I work with the journalists at a local (state-wide) public media organization. It's night and day different from what is described at ars. These are people who are paid a third (or less) of what a sales engineer at meta makes. We have editorial review and ban LLMs for any editorial work except maybe alt-text if I can convince them to use it. They're over-worked, underpaid, and doing what very few people here (including me) have the dedication to do. But hey, if people didn't hate journalists they wouldn't be doing their job.

    • By neya 2026-02-143:51

      Ars Technica has always trash even before LLMs and is mostly an advertisement hub for the highest bidder

  • By anthonj 2026-02-1411:4323 reply

    I have very strong, probably controversial, feeling on arstechnica, but I believe the acquisition from Condé Nast has been a tragedy.

    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.

    • By tapoxi 2026-02-1412:545 reply

      > I have very strong, probably controversial, feeling on arstechnica, but I believe the acquisition from Condé Nast has been a tragedy.

      For the curious, this acquisition was 18 years ago.

      • By goalieca 2026-02-1417:431 reply

        I read ars technica during undergrad over 20 years ago now. It complemented my learning in cpu architecture quite well. While in class we learned old stuff, they covered the modern Intel things. And also, who could forget the fantastically detailed and expert macOS reviews. I’ve never seen any reviews of any kind like that since.

        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!

        • By vanc_cefepime 2026-02-1423:163 reply

          What blogs do you subscribe to for tech stuff in your RSS feed? I still have Ars but I have to weed through a lot of stuff like the political articles. Really like just pure tech like how it used to be with the old Anandtech.

          • By BikiniPrince 2026-02-150:33

            If you find a nice pure tech feed I would jump for joy. Too many places have been overtaken with nonsense.

          • By goalieca 2026-02-1522:28

            I do find a few smaller special interest open source ones like the dolphin emulator blog which still maintains high standards. I too am stuck with finding new high quality new sources for more professional purposes. Things have changed a lot. Open source is now just corporate shareware and most that is written is marketing.

          • By pseudohadamard 2026-02-156:35

            I subscribe to some news site for hackers... "Hacker News" I think it's called. Not RSS, but I've never used that anyway. Google should be able to find it for you.

      • By airstrike 2026-02-1414:481 reply

        God, I didn't need to know that

        • By 01100011 2026-02-1418:301 reply

          How do I report online harassment? There's probably a button but I can't find it because I misplaced my reading glasses.

          • By ordersofmag 2026-02-150:09

            Isn't arstechnica that new site that replaced slashdot?

      • By falsemyrmidon 2026-02-1416:581 reply

        Oddly enough it's not the first time I've seen their perceived recent drop in quality blamed on this. Just weird that it's happened twice - wonder where this narrative is coming from.

        • By linksnapzz 2026-02-1417:251 reply

          No, their quality has been dropping since the acquisition; it's just now gotten to the point where it cannot be explained away.

          • By halJordan 2026-02-153:27

            It's not just gotten to the point it can't be explained away. The best technical articles on the site have been the bio-horror shock material they pump out every month, and it's been that way for years.

            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.

      • By caminante 2026-02-1416:532 reply

        I checked and was also expecting something different based on parent's comment.

        Happened 18 years ago.

        This is a hot take that has become room temp.

        • By c22 2026-02-1417:201 reply

          Boeing merged with McDonnell Douglas almost 30 years ago, but that's still a major reason they suck today.

          • By caminante 2026-02-151:44

            Bad comparison.

            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.

        • By anthonj 2026-02-1417:19

          The transformation has been very slow I believe. They didn't really intrude too much the first few years. But maybe I remember wrong.

    • By phyzome 2026-02-1414:376 reply

      It gets pretty bad at times. Here's one of the most mindlessly uncritical pieces I've seen, which seems to be a press release from Volkswagen: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2017/03/volkswagen-unveils-sedr... Look at the image captions gushing about the "roomy interior" of a vehicle that doesn't even exist! I actually wrote in to say how disappointed I was in this ad/press release material, and the response was "That was not a VW ad and we were not paid by VW for that or any other story". I find it interesting that they only denied the ad part, not the press release part...

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

      • By dylan604 2026-02-1415:531 reply

        "I'm a professional shopper, and here's what I say you should buy" because someone sent me a free version of it or just straight copy to use in my listicle.

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

        • By bsimpson 2026-02-1415:593 reply

          Wirecutter was a good premise, but now it and everyone copying it are untrustworthy.

          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.

          • By whyenot 2026-02-1419:482 reply

            I think it's smart to be skeptical of any "review" site that depends on affiliate links for income. The incentive is no longer to provide advice, it's to sell you something. Anything. Click the link. Good. Now buy something. That's right. Add it to your basket. It doesn't matter what you buy. Yes, higher priced items are better. Checkout. We get our sweet kickback, nice.

            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.

            • By nerdsniper 2026-02-1422:30

              > Yes, higher priced items are better.

              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.

            • By astrange 2026-02-1421:202 reply

              Wirecutter is part of NYTimes and depends on crosswords for income.

              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.)

              • By nerdsniper 2026-02-1422:311 reply

                Wirecutter does an interesting thing where - I don't necessarily disagree with their review of the products they chose. But I'm baffled why they didn't choose to review the overwhelmingly most popular item in the category. Those omissions are what seems the most suspect to me.

                • By godelski 2026-02-151:44

                  Sometimes at the bottom of reviews they mention a lot more products than appeared in the main review. Not always though. Not disagreeing with the decline in reliability but just stating because this can be easy to miss and when it is done I do find it helpful.

              • By whyenot 2026-02-150:141 reply

                Wirecutter has stated in the past, maybe it was on their podcast, that they get a lot of their income from affiliate links. They have done some fairly suspicious things like their “gift guide”s for Christmas which are little more than long lists of products with affiliate links. Same for their “sales guide” for Black Friday, and there have been other cases. That doesn’t mean their reviews are bad, I just approach them with a certain amount of skepticism.

                • By manwe150 2026-02-1518:36

                  Seems in line with their original purpose still. They seemed to always want to be a source to suggest a product that is good enough for a consumer, to help avoid decision paralysis, and avoid fake products that are both expensive and flawed. Suggesting a list of gifts that are suitable and not deeply flawed is exactly what a lot of people are probably looking for around Black Friday.

          • By ghaff 2026-02-1418:03

            Wirecutter still seems pretty good for stuff you aren't really expert on or have strong opinions about. But that was true of Consumer Reports in the old days too. Not saying it's perfect but, especially for low-value purchases, you probably won't go too far wrong.

          • By dylan604 2026-02-1416:171 reply

            Any good idea will be copied by those with lesser motives.

            • By yencabulator 2026-02-1518:24

              And any good execution will be sold off to those who don't care about your motives.

      • By lokar 2026-02-1415:442 reply

        I'm willing to believe it was not an ad.

        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.

        • By dylan604 2026-02-1415:511 reply

          Unfortunately, government is like that were most bills are written by lobbyists and barely if at all modified by the actual congress critter sponsoring it.

          • By lokar 2026-02-1416:05

            I think that's much more common in state government (in the US).

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

        • By phyzome 2026-02-1517:49

          Agreed. I don't think they're lying about it not being a paid advertisement. Like I said, they didn't deny the press release part.

      • By godelski 2026-02-151:41

        Reminds me of Quanta's egregious article Physicists Create a Holographic Wormhole Using a Quantum Computer[0], a blatant ad for CalTech/Harvard/MIT. One where even an article posted the same day by the NYT[1] quoted Scott Aaronson[2] questioning the sensationalism, yet took months for Quanta to post an editor's note... Interestingly even ArsTechnica was even able to fight the hype posting only a few days later[3].

        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-...

      • By halJordan 2026-02-153:29

        It's been this way for years. I know because years ago they defended the practice and explained that the car companies don't pay for a specific review, they just pay for to sponsor stories in the genre of case reviews. And the worst part? The infernal comment section was lauding them.

      • By Marsymars 2026-02-1420:591 reply

        Automotive journalists are in a weird category in almost any publication. They're all dependant on manufacturers providing press units and attending press events that include comp for travel and hotels.

        AFAIK the only real exception is Consumer Reports.

        • By alfiedotwtf 2026-02-1421:39

          It’s worse than that - sometimes they are hired guns…

          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!

      • By ktm5j 2026-02-1415:38

        That car looks so unhappy :|

    • By somenameforme 2026-02-1415:532 reply

      They are basically the embodiment of the fact that sites and organizations don't matter, but individuals do. I think the overwhelming majority of everything on Ars is garbage. But on the other hand they also run Eric Berger's space column [1] which is certainly one of the best ones out there. So don't ignore those names on tops of articles. If you find something informative, well sourced, and so on - there's a good chance most their other writing is of a similar standard.

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

      • By metabagel 2026-02-1418:222 reply

        Somehow, you picked the least credible Ars staffer to me.

        • By BoredPositron 2026-02-1418:43

          Gina on LH is probably the best example.

        • By kranke155 2026-02-152:31

          Eric Berger is least credible because…

      • By miltonlost 2026-02-1417:003 reply

        Ah, and here my problem with Eric is he basically never criticizes Elon and only calls him "controversial". He's just a Musk mouthpiece at this point.

        • By amarant 2026-02-1418:201 reply

          Ars is already a anti-Elon echo chamber. I stopped paying my subscription after a moderator endorsed a commenter issuing a (almost certainly empty) death threat to Elon.

          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

          • By metabagel 2026-02-1419:014 reply

            Musk illegally impounded funds resulting in about 800,000 deaths a year for the foreseeable future. It does tend to make one angry.

            • By amarant 2026-02-1419:33

              I'm not saying he's a great guy, I'm saying death threats are a bridge too far, especially for professional journalists.

            • By roughly 2026-02-1419:21

              Yes, but that’s indirect violence, we’re fine with that. Calling for someone’s death directly - as in, by name, and not via a complicated policy recommendation? Well, that’s just rude.

            • By hunterpayne 2026-02-150:38

              Please explain this.

            • By holoduke 2026-02-1421:34

              [flagged]

        • By mistercheph 2026-02-1417:172 reply

          What would you do if you loved space as much as he does? There are no other heroes to cheer for

          • By mbreese 2026-02-1418:201 reply

            Or many other sources. If you’re writing about Space, you kinda need to cover SpaceX. If you’re opening critical of everything the owner says, pretty soon you won’t have any sources at SpaceX to give you the insights you need to do your job. I get the impression that the space field is pretty small, so you might not want to burn too many bridges.

            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.

            • By somenameforme 2026-02-1419:552 reply

              This is even more true when politics has a rather short time horizon. Musk decided to jump into public politics at a time when the nation is substantially more divided and radicalized than it's been in living memory for most of us, to say nothing of being fueled by a media that's descended into nothing but endless hyper partisan yellow journalism. It's not really a surprise that things didn't work out great. But as the 'affected' move on to new people and new controversies, perspectives will moderate and normalize over time.

              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.

              • By kbelder 2026-02-1622:54

                All of Musk's political nonsense, social media theatrics, etc., aside, if SpaceX performs over the next decade or two the way one would hope, he'll be remembered for centuries because of that. Tesla, X, his political dalliances, will fade to obscurity compared to that.

              • By ozmodiar 2026-02-1514:35

                Elon just needs a wild party to blow off steam.

          • By ozmodiar 2026-02-1514:33

            If there's one thing I've learned, it's that there are no heroes to cheer for.

        • By kranke155 2026-02-152:32

          Not sure what you’d like him to do here. He’s not a political journalist.

    • By mbreese 2026-02-1414:194 reply

      I think the fact that they one of the last places surviving from that generation of the Internet says a lot. The Condé Nast acquisition may have been a tragedy, but they managed to survive for this long. They’ve been continuously publishing online for about 30 years. It’s honestly amazing that they’ve managed to last this long.

      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.

      • By krull10 2026-02-1416:081 reply

        Their review of MacOS 26 is 79 pages when downloaded as a pdf, so they still sometimes have in depth articles. But I agree that that level of detail isn’t as common as in the past.

      • By x0x0 2026-02-1418:461 reply

        Everyone's dancing around the problem. People refuse to pay the cost of producing high quality news. Advertising doesn't come close to cutting it.

        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.

        • By mbreese 2026-02-1419:35

          ArsTechnica has had subscriber tiers for quite a while. I am one. I’m not sure how many people subscribe or what their numbers look like, but I’d hope that Ars will be able to still be able to keep going in whatever the new media market looks like.

          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.

      • By DANmode 2026-02-1422:14

        Operating systems are fading to the background; even technical users can lose track of what version of the OS they’re currently using.

      • By anonymousiam 2026-02-1420:061 reply

        100% agree. I still have Ars Technica and Slashdot in my RSS feed list, but both are paused. Every now and then (maybe once a month) I'll take a peek, but it's rare that I'll find anything really worthwhile. About 10% of the content is slanted to push their desired narratives, so objectivity is gone.

        • By shantara 2026-02-1512:02

          I still had Slashdot in my RSS feed, purely out of inertia. I don’t even interact with it much other than occasionally marking it as read. This was the push I needed to unsubscribe from it.

    • By BruceEel 2026-02-1416:072 reply

      A tragedy, yes. I can't be the only old fart around here with fond memories of John Siracusa's macOS ("OS X") reviews & Jon "Hannibal" Stokes' deep dives in CPU microarchitectures...

      • By calmbonsai 2026-02-1418:16

        John Siracusa's macOS reviews were so in-depth people even published reviews of his reviews.

      • By herodoturtle 2026-02-1416:113 reply

        Certainly not the only old fart ‘round these parts.

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

        • By guiambros 2026-02-1416:211 reply

          Dr Dobbs was pretty good until almost the end, no? If memory serves me well, I recall the magazine got thinner and more sparse towards the end, but still high signal-to-noise ratio. Quite the opposite of Ars T.

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

          • By trollbridge 2026-02-1419:01

            I would go to the library on my bicycle to scour for a new copy of DDJ as a 10 year old.

            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.

        • By calmbonsai 2026-02-1418:181 reply

          Anyone remember "Compute!"? I still have (mostly) fond memories of typing in games in Basic.

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

          • By NetMageSCW 2026-02-1418:49

            Compute!, Dr. Dobb’s, Kilobaud Microcomputing, Byte. Good magazines that are missed.

        • By kbutler 2026-02-1417:23

          I finally subscribed to Dr. Dobbs for the Michael Abrash graphics articles, about a month before he ended them.

    • By embedding-shape 2026-02-1412:279 reply

      > 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?

      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.

      • By rfc2324 2026-02-1412:442 reply

        https://theconversation.com/us/who-we-are is one of my favorites. Global academics writing about their research when something happens in the world or when they are published in a journal.

        • By rdmuser 2026-02-1413:10

          One other thing people might like about the conversation is that it has a bunch of regional subsections so it isn't overrun by US news like a lot of news sites. Well outside the US section of course. I know I personally appreciate having another source of informed writting that also covers local factors and events.

        • By dotancohen 2026-02-1415:273 reply

          That may be for the technology and science sections. But the politics section is clearly pushing an agenda with regard to the current US administration - even though it is an agenda many people online might agree with. That section is not global, it is US-centric, and it heavily favours the popular side of the issue.

          • By lokar 2026-02-1415:472 reply

            You prefer a "both sides" style of political coverage?

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

            • By kevin_thibedeau 2026-02-1417:421 reply

              I like this aphorism someone once stated on bothsides-ism: When an arson burns down your home you don't pause to consider their side of the situation. Standing up to a bully doesn't mean the bully is being treated unfairly. They're just not accustomed to pushback on their BS and quickly don the caul of victimhood whenever their position is exposed.

              • By dotancohen 2026-02-1419:472 reply

                [flagged]

                • By hluska 2026-02-1421:322 reply

                  What are you talking about? This had absolutely nothing to do with Israel until you injected that.

                  • By pickleRick243 2026-02-1422:34

                    what is it about?

                  • By direwolf20 2026-02-158:552 reply

                    Israel is a perfect example of what's being talked about — a bully that acts like a victim to gain sympathy so it can bully you further.

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

                    • By mhb 2026-02-1513:581 reply

                      [flagged]

                      • By direwolf20 2026-02-1517:06

                        I thought of Israel because the parent comment was about Israel and I read that comment. I thought that was quite obvious. There's no need to get hostile.

                    • By dotancohen 2026-02-1513:191 reply

                      [flagged]

                      • By direwolf20 2026-02-1517:06

                        For the same reason that the Russian province of Donbass has been attacked by Ukraine for its entire existence. Explaining it in great detail would be far too off–topic.

                • By C6JEsQeQa5fCjE 2026-02-1421:301 reply

                  This comment is surely satire?

                  • By dotancohen 2026-02-151:371 reply

                    [flagged]

                    • By Dylan16807 2026-02-152:091 reply

                      > already people were accusing Israel of genocide

                      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.

                      • By dotancohen 2026-02-1513:221 reply

                        [flagged]

                        • By ozmodiar 2026-02-1514:311 reply

                          What's the deal with the settlers? That's really where I lose all faith Isreal has good intentions.

                          • By dotancohen 2026-02-1516:28

                            I understand from your comment, please correct me if I misunderstood, that you oppose Jews building houses in the West Bank.

                            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.

            • By dylan604 2026-02-1415:571 reply

              Or the other side of at what point into ending capitalism in favor of socialism should that stop?

              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

              • By lokar 2026-02-1416:042 reply

                I see the capitalism vs socialism as a spectrum with valid debate all along it.

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

                • By dylan604 2026-02-1416:191 reply

                  Ahh, you must be using the rational definition of socialism and not the extremist corrupted use as cover for dictators.

                  • By lokar 2026-02-1515:29

                    I always try to go for the rational version of stuff

          • By hluska 2026-02-1421:36

            Odd, the Conversation has a version from France (that covers French news), Canada (that covers Canadian news), an African version (that…get this covers African news) and many other editions. I can’t shake the feeling that you just have an axe to grind and that axe is such a huge part of your identity that you’ll change facts to fit your chosen narrative. And you know, that’s very sad - we have these amazing cerebral cortexes and are capable of so much more.

          • By throawayonthe 2026-02-1415:351 reply

            i don't think these are as contradictory as you make them out to be

            • By dotancohen 2026-02-1415:443 reply

              I'm not pointing out a contradiction. I am pointing out that this site - which otherwise seems great - it heavily promoting the popular-online side of a very controversial subject.

              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

              • By NetMageSCW 2026-02-1418:511 reply

                That’s interesting to me because my trust in Consumer Reports was heavily eroded when I read a review on computer printers that was basically all wrong and wondered if any of there other reviews could possibly be trusted.

                • By bombcar 2026-02-1419:50

                  Consumer reports is really good at following their methodology, but you really need to read and understand their methodology, because it's often completely worthless.

                  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

              • By embedding-shape 2026-02-1416:132 reply

                > - it heavily promoting the popular-online side of a very controversial subject

                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?

                • By dotancohen 2026-02-1419:521 reply

                  I'm not from the US either, but I see much vitriol against their current president and his policies. And not a single article in support.

                  • By direwolf20 2026-02-158:561 reply

                    When one side says it's raining and the other side says it's sunny, it's not the journalist's job to represent both sides. It's their job to look out the window.

                    • By dotancohen 2026-02-1513:291 reply

                      Agreed.

                      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.

                      • By direwolf20 2026-02-1517:051 reply

                        Your window might be fogged up.

                        • By dotancohen 2026-02-1518:331 reply

                          You might consider dispensing with the analogy and tell me in clear language. I don't know exactly what your objection is.

                          • By direwolf20 2026-02-1523:501 reply

                            Bias has nothing to do with which "side" is discussed more. Bias has everything to do with whether the discussion reflects the truth. Was the weather analogy not clear enough?

                            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?

                            • By dotancohen 2026-02-163:30

                              So is the sunny argument recognising that there are large numbers of illegal immigrants in the US and violent US citizens that benefit from their exploitation protecting them?

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

                • By hluska 2026-02-1423:541 reply

                  [flagged]

                  • By embedding-shape 2026-02-1511:31

                    Huh, what are you referring to? Why does it matter so much what I think and say?

              • By nikodunk 2026-02-1416:13

                I really hope _this_ quote is not fabricated - because what a fantastic quote!!

      • By justinclift 2026-02-1414:39

      • By lapcat 2026-02-1412:401 reply

        > What places on the internet remains where articles are written by actual experts?

        The personal blogs of experts.

      • By astrange 2026-02-1421:27

        Aren't they all making YouTube videos now? It's basically the best place to get paid for making expert content.

      • By bloggie 2026-02-1412:42

        techbriefs, photonics spectra, photonics focus, EAA Sport Aviation? I don't think it's going to be anything super popular, to become popular you have to appeal to a broad audience. But in niches there is certainly very high quality material. It also won't be (completely) funded by advertising.

      • By Levitating 2026-02-1413:45

        lwn.net?

      • By ycombinete 2026-02-1414:10

        The London review of Books frequently has domain experts writing their reviews.

      • By dave7 2026-02-1423:42

        TFT Central is still very good imo.

      • By hobs 2026-02-1414:43

    • By GeekyBear 2026-02-1415:071 reply

      > publishing articles that are 90% press material from some company and most of the times seems to have very little technical knowledge.

      Unfortunately, this is my impression as well.

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

      • By zdw 2026-02-1415:372 reply

        The main problem with technology coverage is you have one of 3 types of writers in the space:

        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.

        • By GeekyBear 2026-02-1419:161 reply

          When Andrei Frumusanu left Anandtech for Qualcomm, I'm sure he was paid much more for engineering chips than he was for writing about them, but his insight into the various core designs released for desktops and mobile was head and shoulders above anything I've seen since.

          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.

          • By zdw 2026-02-1422:49

            There are still places that benchmark, but mostly for commercial apps like Puget Systems in the earlier post. Phoronix can also be useful as well for benching open source stuff.

            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.

        • By gowld 2026-02-2013:50

          > 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

          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.

    • By tyjen 2026-02-1418:17

      It's worse than that, Condé Nast is owned by Advance Publications.

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

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

    • By foobarbecue 2026-02-1413:094 reply

      I presume you meant "fantastic," not "fantastical"?

      • By jmbwell 2026-02-1416:482 reply

        I think fantastical isn’t totally inaccurate, and I’m not being snarky (for once). The personal observations and sometimes colorful language has been something I like about Ars. Benj in particular, with his warm tributes to BBSes. Or Jim Salter’s very human networking articles. The best stuff on Ars is both technically sound and rich with human experience. “Fantastical” taken to mean something like, capturing the thrills and aspirations that emerge from our contact with technology, seems fair I think.

        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

        • By eduction 2026-02-1417:551 reply

          “Fantastical” means based on fantasy: not real. A fantastical journalism source is one filled with lies.

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

          • By strken 2026-02-1422:09

            It has a second definition which means something like "unbelievable in its strangeness/perfection", which can be used to imply that a real thing feels made up.

            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.

        • By dnisbet 2026-02-1715:16

          Benj Edwards posted about it on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/benjedwards.com/post/3mewgow6ch22p

      • By globular-toast 2026-02-1417:41

        It's funny because I assume "fantastical" was invented so people could still express the true meaning of fantastic, ie. a piece of fantasy.

      • By Insanity 2026-02-1414:53

        Wanted to comment the same. Parent poster might not be aware that “fantastical” means “fantasy”.

        But I think we do get his point regardless :)

      • By eduction 2026-02-1418:001 reply

        I confess I find the growing prevalence of these sorts of errors on HN dispiriting. Programming requires precision in code; I’d argue software engineering requires precision in language, because it involves communicating effectively with people.

        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.)

        • By anthonj 2026-02-1418:211 reply

          Jesus christ man, you are pulling out a lot from a single typo, eh? English is just not my first language (and not the last either). Having an accent or the occasional misspelling on some forum has never impacted me professionally.

          • By eduction 2026-02-281:34

            Slow down. If you read my comment it’s about an aggregate trend, not you or even your comment, which I don’t mention. Plenty of native speakers are slipping. (Fwiw the quality of your writing is pretty native feeling, so good work)

    • By episode404 2026-02-1412:081 reply

      > they used to write fantastical and very informative articles

      > Still a very good website

      These are indeed quite controversial opinions on ars.

    • By elgertam 2026-02-1414:57

      I used to read it daily. Even continued for a few years after the acquisition. But at this point, I haven't looked at it in years. Even tend to skip the articles that make it to the first page of HN. Of course, most of the original writers I still follow on social media, and some have started their own Substack publications.

    • By bootlooped 2026-02-1416:41

      I got very tired of seeing the same video thumbnails over and over.

      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 jasonwatkinspdx 2026-02-1417:19

      Yeah, I was very active on the ars forums back in the day, and after the buyout things initially were ok, but started go do down hill pretty clearly once the old guard of authors started leaving.

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

    • By airstrike 2026-02-1414:48

      I got banned for calling out the shilling back right after the acquisition. Apparently that was a personal attack on the quality of the author. It's gone downhill from there. I used to visit it every day, now I mostly forget it exists

    • By kevin_thibedeau 2026-02-1417:30

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

      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.

    • By pseudohadamard 2026-02-153:57

      Arse Technica have always been pretty bad at following up with people they publish stories on. Years ago they ran a hit piece on a friend of mine for which they never bothered contacting him for his side of the story despite his home page with full contact info being literally the first Google result on a search for his name. Their tech stories are usually superficial but adequate, but don't assume you're getting any kind of valid reporting on controversies.

    • By DANmode 2026-02-1422:13

      > probably controversial, feeling on arstechnica, but I believe the acquisition from Condé Nast has been a tragedy.

      Controversial how?

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

    • By xnx 2026-02-1423:08

      Ars is disproportionately popular here for a site that just copies from other news sources. Do they add any value beyond serving as a link list for a certain type of content?

    • By physicsguy 2026-02-1514:50

      They had some great video series too which seem to have stopped. Their War Stories gaming interviews were brilliant.

    • By zahlman 2026-02-1417:08

      > the acquisition from Condé Nast

      By Condé Nast? Or did they get acquired again?

    • By Cluelessidoit 2026-02-1522:36

      AMEN

    • By idiotsecant 2026-02-1411:511 reply

      [flagged]

      • By anthonj 2026-02-1412:00

        Well I am calling out an entire class of journalist. Every time I've made a similar statement I got some angry answer (or got my post hidden or removed).

  • By lukan 2026-02-1411:492 reply

    The context here is this story, an AI Agent publishs a hit piece on the Matplotlib maintainer.

    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?

    • By everdrive 2026-02-1411:583 reply

      Ars has been going downhill for sometime now. I think it's difficult for a lot of these bigger publishers to be anything other than access journalism and advertising. I'm not saying Ars is fully there yet, but the pull is strong.

      • By kethinov 2026-02-1412:079 reply

        The comments section on Ars is particularly depressing. I've been posting there for two decades and watched it slowly devolve from a place where thoughtful discussions happened to now just being one of the worst echo chambers on the internet, like a bad subreddit. I've made suggestions over the years in their public feedback surveys to alter their forum software to discourage mob behavior, but they don't seem to be doing anything about it.

        • By the_biot 2026-02-1412:282 reply

          They don't actually publish the comments under the article, only a link. I've long suspected sites doing that are fully aware of how shit the comment section is, and try to hide it from casual viewers while keeping the nutjob gallery happy.

          Phoronix comes to mind.

          • By mbreese 2026-02-1414:031 reply

            This goes back a lot farther with Ars. They done this for years because their comments section is driven by forum software. The main conversations happen in the forums. They are then reformatted for a the comment view.

            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.

            • By bombcar 2026-02-1419:54

              The Ars forums used to be incredibly useful sources of information - many of their best authors "grew" from forum posters; and the comments sections on articles were quite informative and had serious comments from actual experts - and discussion!

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

          • By Sharlin 2026-02-1413:40

            Most mainstream news sites around here have by now hidden the comment section somehow, either making it folded by default or just moving it to the bottom of the page below "related news" sections and the like.

        • By g947o 2026-02-1413:402 reply

          Hard agree. https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/06/meta-debuts-playstati... is an example I remember. The subject matter of the is not controversial (just another Game Pass like subscription), but the comment section is full of -- yes you've guessed it -- Meta BAD! There is absolutely no meaningful discussion of the service itself.

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

          • By murderfs 2026-02-1413:441 reply

            You see the same sort of thing around here with people complaining about the death of Google Reader on anything that even vaguely mentions Google.

            • By wizzwizz4 2026-02-1413:572 reply

              I don't see that.

              • By everdrive 2026-02-1513:041 reply

                HN has also been taking a turn lately. Part of it is a large influx of new users, part of it (I suspect) is just a growing disenfranchisement with the technology scene. I'm partly to blame for this as well. I've tried to stop commenting most of the time since my first and strongest response has just been to express my anger and frustration at the direction most technology is taking.

                • By wizzwizz4 2026-02-1516:16

                  If you have a computer, a static IP address, basic programming ability, and an eye for quality, you have the power to make things better.

              • By stavros 2026-02-1415:37

                You know what else I don't see? Google Reader, because Google killed it!

          • By acdha 2026-02-1416:321 reply

            Philosophically I want to agree with you more but Meta is the informational equivalent of RJ Reynolds. They’ve facilitated crime waves (remember all of the hand-wringing about shoplifting which died down when the government went after Facebook marketplace and Amazon?), supported genocide, and elevated some of the worst voices in the world. Giving them more money and social control is a risk which should be discussed.

            • By internet2000 2026-02-1417:232 reply

              You're doing it too. Please don't.

              • By acdha 2026-02-1420:041 reply

                I realize it makes you uncomfortable but the harms are done whether or not you ignore them. That’s the problem: people can exploit that desire to be fair, “neutral”, say it’s “just business”, etc. for years until the negative impacts on society are too hard to ignore. Think about how the fossil fuel industry managed to get people to talk like there was a debate with two sides deserving equal respect and parlay that into half a century of inaction after the scientific consensus correctly recognized that there was a real harm being done. We’re going to look back at the attention economy similarly.

                • By Gracana 2026-02-1420:152 reply

                  > I realize it makes you uncomfortable

                  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.

                  • By acdha 2026-02-1514:04

                    Perhaps–it’s hard to tell from a single sentence–but I would recommend reading more than the first comment of that thread. The person at the top exaggerated how much it’s not talking about the service or competing options, and the people talking about Facebook are raising what is a reasonable point about privacy and data mining.

              • By Groxx 2026-02-1419:57

                Evil deserves to be called out as evil. Why should we constrain the discussion to anything else about them? The absolute best thing they can do for the world would be to disappear, as soon as possible.

        • By raddan 2026-02-1413:522 reply

          The switch to their newest forum software seems to discourage any kind of actual conversation. If I recall correctly, the last iteration was also unthreaded, but somehow it was easier for a back-and-forth to develop. Now it is basically just reactions-- like YouTube comments (which, ironically, is actually threaded).

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

          • By badgersnake 2026-02-1415:09

            > Is HN really the last remaining forum for science and technology conversations?

            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.

          • By JohnnyMarcone 2026-02-1415:191 reply

            lobste.rs is smaller but can have good discussion.

            • By raddan 2026-02-1810:561 reply

              Thanks for the tip. Sadly it appears that lobste.rs is invite only?

              • By JohnnyMarcone 2026-02-1814:13

                Yeah, I haven't tried to get an invite, but I enjoy lurking there. Seems like a cool system.

        • By bsimpson 2026-02-1416:02

          I can say that to a certain degree about Hacker News too.

          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.

        • By kotaKat 2026-02-1413:19

          They should get rid of the fairly extremely prominent badges of years-on-the-forum and number-of-comments. Maybe that'd help quell some of the echo down, because every comment section on Ars articles is 10+ year old accounts all arguing with each other.

        • By hed 2026-02-1413:331 reply

          I can only conclude it’s what they want at this point

          • By NetMageSCW 2026-02-1418:55

            It is certainly how they moderate.

        • By mikkupikku 2026-02-1414:241 reply

          Try reading Slashdot these days and it's the same story. I stopped reading regularly when cmdrtaco left but still check in occasionally out of misplaced nostalgia or something.. The comment section is like a time capsule from the 00s, the same ideas and arguments have been echoing back and forth there for years, seemingly losing soul and nuance with each echo. Bizarre, and sad.

          • By dotancohen 2026-02-1415:311 reply

            I'd like to subscribe to your newsletter, you insensitive clod.

            • By bombcar 2026-02-1419:56

              Netcraft reports the newsletter is dead, and covered in hot grits.

        • By archerx 2026-02-1412:23

          Yea but doing that would decrease engagement and engagement is the only metric that matters! /s

        • By ifwinterco 2026-02-1413:27

          Yeah it's like a rogues' gallery of terminally online midwits over there

      • By acdha 2026-02-1416:232 reply

        The bigger story is the way tech companies sucked the oxygen out of journalism. This started with capturing a growing chunk of ad revenue but then became editorial control as everyone started picking headlines, writing styles, and publication schedules to please the tech companies which control whether they receive 80% of their traffic.

        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.

        • By themafia 2026-02-1420:08

          > sucked the oxygen out of journalism.

          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.

        • By fatherwavelet 2026-02-150:131 reply

          Like the good old days when the media was basically complicit in support of Iraq having weapons of mass destruction?

          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.

          • By acdha 2026-02-1513:58

            Like the good old days where most markets had multiple papers which had to keep readers subscribing, when broadcasters had to follow the Fairness Doctrine and had a push to more moderation because they couldn’t pick and choose their audience.

            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.

      • By embedding-shape 2026-02-1412:28

        > I think it's difficult for a lot of these bigger publishers to be anything other than access journalism and advertising

        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.

    • By dare944 2026-02-1418:48

      > Race to the bottom?

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

HackerNews

About