[phendrenad2]

This is like blaming the stock market going up or down on the president. Conde Nast may have simply been the last one holding the "hot potato". In the face of social media platforms sucking the userbase away from blogs and traditional websites, can you really blame them? Does Chrome even have a way to follow RSS feeds, or do you need to install a shady plugin?

[sybercecurity]

Partially, but can't go back in time and prove otherwise. When Conde Nast started buying up specialty like Bicycling, Outdoors, and Wired they transformed them into generic "lifestyle" magazines (10-15 years ago). I remember flipping through Bicycling and seeing 3 car advertisements before getting to the first that had anything to do with cycling and all the columns and editorials contained product pitches for personal care products("What I'm obsessed with this week!").

Would these magazines have survived without Conde Nast? I don't know. I know I stopped buying/reading/visiting websites of all of them soon after because I got bored seeing the same things regardless of the title. I guess the counterpoint would be any niche publication that is still doing well in today's publishing environment.

[rsingel]

Conde Nast has never bought specialty mags, and doesn't own Outdoors or Bicycling.

It bought Wired mag (but not the online site) in like 1998.

The closest Conde Nast has now to a specialist site is Ars Technica, which it bought almost 20 years ago

[postmodest]

Condé Nast turned Wired and Ars from being magazines for tech workers interested in long-form articles, into magazines for VC bros who want to read about Porsches and Burning Man. They became catalogues for Silicon Valley Money to keep in a rack next to the toilet.

[whynotminot]

And Ars is still great!

[dlivingston]

I read Ars multiple times a week. It's not Pulitzer-winning stuff, but certainly more thoughtful than The Verge. Can someone help me understand why it's being panned as losing quality?

[rsingel]

It has monthly page view quotas for writers, which changes what gets covered.

It laid off or lost most of its best tech policy writers, including Joe Mullin, Cyrus Farivar, David Kravets, and Timothy B Lee.

[ledauphin]

it really isn't. but to be fair, it got a lot worse many years after the acquisition (2008), so it's hard to be certain whose fault it was.

[Ghos3t]

Press X for doubt

[teh_infallible]

Ars used to have interesting articles about novel intersections between technology and the law. Now it’s like a Sharper Image catalogue.

[sybercecurity]

You are correct, it's a Hearst publication. Thought it was CN. Still, Hearst could be said to be doing the same thing: watering down niche publications in the name of synergy.

[gs17]

There's web-based readers that work in Chrome. After Google Reader died, I moved to Feedly which seems to still work alright.

[CountHackulus]

There's also TheOldReader which is the same UI as Google Reader and works great.

[njroute22]

I use InoReader - excellent and works quite nicely (even the free version).

[itsoktocry]

Exactly. We always tend to blame the purchaser, but why not the seller? If their business was good and they cared about the product, why sell? And if the business was bad, can't blame they buyer, either.

[Loughla]

To your second question: ethics, it turns out, aren't as powerful as a mountain of cash to ski down like Scrooge McDuck.