The Verge is honestly pretty great. Usually. It's the only mainstream tech news publication that feels like it's not bought out by every company (re: CNET)
The first sign I should probably stop visiting The Verge was Nilay Patel's fashion meltdown[1] Then a few years later they DMCA'd a bunch of YouTubers making fun of a Verge-produced PC building video[2].
I realize Kotaku and Gawker aren't much better reputation-wise, but a journalism outfit (The Verge) issuing DMCAs against people reporting on them rankled me much worse than the former two. Absolute hypocrisy.
I don't think those things are good at all (especially 2., that was a mess), but the Verge has hundreds of people working for them, and I think overall their content is amazing.
Nilay Patel is... uh, a mood, he's probably my least favourite part of the Verge.
Even though Arstechnica is owned by Conde Nast, it's still my go-to for most tech news, albeit normally more specialized in certain fields. But at least once per week they have a really excellent and in-depth article about a variety of topics.
Ars has always been consistently in-depth and technically insightful, somewhere in-between TechCrunch/The Verge and Phoronix/XDA Devs.
My only minor complaint is that Ron Amadeo is so transparently bitter about every little bit of Google news, to the point these days he only reports the bad and very rarely the good.
Like, the last news article on RCS was about 3 years ago... Right before all four US carriers standardized on Google Messages + Universal Profile (and three of them on Jibe). There's been a mountain of RCS developments happening lately but it doesn't fit the narrative of "Google is bad at messaging" so no articles are written. You can bet if RCS has even a minor gaffe, it'll get an article. (See this play out with Ars' reporting on Google's payments efforts.)
Other than that, Ars is my go-to as well. I just have to mentally apply the Amadeo Bias Filter before I read any article about Google.
For the record, I am also incredibly bitter about Google[1]. But I'm not a reporter.
The endless-summer of the net dilutes the relevancy of information exponentially every year, while also exponentially increasing the amount of non-trivially discovered good information every year.
The good becomes burried by the bad, in ever increasing volume. The tasty nuggets of information being eaten by ever-larger sewer-slimes.
1. https://www.gawker.com/adult-website-editor-throws-twitter-t...
2. https://kotaku.com/the-verges-infamous-pc-build-gets-fixed-1...
I realize Kotaku and Gawker aren't much better reputation-wise, but a journalism outfit (The Verge) issuing DMCAs against people reporting on them rankled me much worse than the former two. Absolute hypocrisy.