End of the road for AnandTech

I’m sad to read that AnandTech has posted its final article. I respect the writers and editors for the depth of the articles they published. You felt smarter after finishing one of their pieces, because it was written to actually educate you about the topics it covered. And in fact, it makes me want to go out and find other websites with such in-depth articles and actually support them by subscribing. I never did that with AnandTech (did they even offer subscriptions?), so I’m part of the problem. I hate advertising and the world it has created, so I would rather pay publishers directly, and now it’s too late to save AnandTech. So it’s a reminder that I (we) need to support the publishers that deliver high quality content. Their final article and the About page discuss the problem of sensationalist reporting, and how they aspired to avoid that fate. I am one of the people who wishes there were a good business model to promote the kind of writing that AnandTech published. Most of the comments on the Hacker News post about AnandTech’s final article are also about this problem of sensationalist journalism, because I’m not the only one who feels a sense of loss, and a nostalgia for the days when AnandTech began.