strategy will focus more on traffic and collaboration with sales and SEO.
Well Engadget, you had a good run.
We need more clickbait, less real info, maybe have an AI write it all??
You mean like CNET?
Half their posts are basically ads.
Yeah, now they’re going to focus even more on SEO than they already were?
Well, almost everyone blocks ads so this is the next iteration. Anyone with a few braincells saw this coming. In the future, the only way you’re going to get actual/verifiable/trustworthy news is by paying for it. Like the good ol’ times.
Who knew journalism is an actual job? not me. I want every website to be free.
The freely available ones are going to run by the rich to peddle ads and propaganda (yes they do it already but there are still free press floating around asking for donations, which will eventually dry out). The poor will be misled with mis-information and clickbaits and people will wonder why shitheads are getting elected everywhere.
Bots will be posting these on every social media (federated or not) and the freeloaders and “no advertisements ever” crowd that never contribute anything to a sustainable internet with free and accessible information for all will be complaining about “enshittification” all day long.
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I’m with you. Ads are annoying but I sort of wish there was (maybe just more around here?) acknowledgement of that’s just how the service gets paid for. I don’t adblock anything. If I can’t stand the ads I don’t use it. I just ignore them. Maybe I’m old and grew up with broadcast tv. I’d rather be subjected to internet ads than have to pay (real currency) at every site I go to. Folks can Adblock all they want but I don’t see how that’s any better than corpo short term quarterly earning thinking vs long term wide range impacts consideration.
Say hi to HBO for me in the corporate afterlife!
“collaboration with sales and SEO teams is key moving forward” That’s definitely what the people want. Sounds like a recipe for quality tech reporting you dumb fuck.
The economy doesn’t care what people aka consumers want anymore. At shareholder insistence of sabotaging the future for a short term stock boost, they merge, buy, and consolidate to eliminate competition, lay off their talent crippling that sector’s ability to provide the product/service they existed to provide in the first place, and laugh all the way to the bank offering broken, useless shadows of once useful products/services because where else you gonna go? We ate the ones that made superior products and put a stop to that bullshit!
The ultimate goal of capitalism is to end competition. This is the terminal stage. The nowhere left to grow/metastasize fire sale before their grift collapses, with it’s tentacles gripping captured world government’s throats, ready to take them with them as it perishes and the winners run away to their global havens and bunkers, mischief managed, wealth of nations siphoned, pillaged, and stolen.
Fucking Suckers.
I don’t know what others thought prior to this, but I still respected Engadget enough to visit their site directly from time to time. This is awful.
Engadget has slowly been dying for a decade. It feels like a slight step up from Gizmodo, which is also in pretty bad shape these days.
What tech blogs are still half way decent? The Verge?
Ars technica is still firing on all cylinders.
Went way downhill after the conde naste acquisition.
Definitely added some coverage to less computer tech, like the car reviews and pure science coverage, but in terms of treating their readers well, they’re still very good. Not that the bar is high, but still.
Tom’s hardware is still solid
And the terminal stage capitalism enshittification continues with nary a pitchfork or guillotine to be found.
Fuckers will be a hundred feet deep in their luxury bunkers, and half the choking peasants all working for one of 3 monopolies that own the entire crumbling global economy will still be like “we must stay the course. We’ve sunk too much gambling into this fallacy to quit now, cough.”
Humans are silly, silly creatures.
What the hell is velocity and how does it relate to a website? Oh, maybe it’s a new term for “increasing the speed we churn content out using AI”.
Velocity is work done over time. It’s an Agile process thing.
True, I forgot about that from my time of being forced to use SAFe. I guess it still means they’ll use AI to churn out content faster than before the layoffs.
Velocity still applies in SAFe unless my firm does it wrong
Everything is so bloated and captured… Kids, know that it wasn’t always like this.
At CNET — where Priestley previously worked, according to LinkedIn —
Say no more 🤮
I used to enjoy the old Joystiq site. Followed them to Engadget. Hell, I used the Joystiq url redirect bookmark until it stopped working. Might as well just delete the bookmark now, no sense it watching it slide further into irrelevancy.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
“[The changes] will allow us to streamline our work, increase our velocity, and ultimately deliver the best content to our readers,” Sarah Priestley, who is listed as Engadget’s general manager on its masthead, wrote in a memo shared by Max Tani at Semafor.
Priestley, who previously was VP of digital marketing operations at Red Ventures, also wrote that collaboration with sales and SEO teams is key moving forward.
This simplified structure is intended to help increase velocity while we create top quality content that’s relevant and valuable to our audience,” Katelyn Brehony, spokesperson for Engadget told The Verge in an email.
“Engadget has played a vital role in tech journalism for 20 years and we’re confident that these efficiencies will support future growth and set us up for the long-term as we continue to deliver the best experience for our readers.”
At CNET — where Priestley previously worked, according to LinkedIn — a similar emphasis on SEO and marketing have gradually hollowed out the newsroom, either because so many staff left or were laid off.
As Google continues to introduce generative AI search results, some companies have been looking to product recommendations and reviews as a safeguard against traffic declines — sometimes at the expense of quality or independence.
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