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Ask HN: What happened to theregister.com?

219 points by donpott ↗ HN
Asking here because I think there is probably a lot of overlap and maybe some knowledgeable insiders.

I used to visit The Register almost every day up until a few years ago. Back then, it was famous for its punny headlines, tongue-in-cheek reporting style, and all in all being a self-identified IT tabloid.

I visited it again a week or two ago, and it seems to have dropped the humourous tone and intentionally-obscure headlines, to become just one more samey IT news page.

Does anybody know what caused this transformation? Has it been acquired by a conglomerate or something? The nearest thing I've found is that its original Chief Editor left in May 2019...

138 comments

[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 188 ms ] thread
quickthrower2
Example of the previous editorial style: https://web.archive.org/web/20190410065314/https://www.there...
taffronaut
That's a real contrast. The current site is a shadow of its former self. The new stuff doesn't even seem to be paid-for placement - just lame outsourced copy.
quickthrower2
Bean counters have taken over. Ad in front of geek = $1 / 1000 impression. Ad in front of CTO = $10 / 1000 impressions. Then milk the cow, get the investment back and move on.

Anyway

https://www.theonion.com/

https://www.betootaadvocate.com/

Hopefully http://n-gate.com/ gets going again. (Type out the url, he detects HN redirects).

hansel_der
> Type out the url, he detects HN redirects

referer actually

antisthenes
Bland tabloid then, and bland tabloid now. What changed?

I really don't see much of a difference

xtracto
I don't know... for me, who read it in the mid 2000s it was kind of like reading the "Big Issue" or the "Metro" in the UK: Sometimes I wanted to read low thinking tabloid funny news. The Register was great for that. Nowadays it is Yet Another Technology Website.
quickthrower2
From the link:

"Rust never sleeps: C++-alike language tops Stack Overflow survey for fourth year in a row"

The tongue was a bit more in cheek before I guess

gjsman-1000
Not sure, but my theory is that Google SEO had to do with it after Google tried to remove false or misleading headlines around the election and afterwards. At the time (and still somewhat now), satire was/is often quite lost on Google. This presumably hurt ad revenues.
bryanlarsen
Mike Magee was co founder of the Register and established its style. He left in 2001, and the Register has been declining ever since.
krmboya
Declining since 2001! That must be such a glacial decline
chasil
I believe he then started the inquirer.net which ran for another decade.

I remember them occasionally featuring a fragment of a poem by Alexander Pope:

  "Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer,
  And without sneering, teach the rest to sneer."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damning_with_faint_praise
rozab
To see this gloriously realised, check out CGP Grey's description of Pope's feud with Thomas Hearne. Linking the full video because it's a masterpiece

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEV9qoup2mQ

chasil
By some strange coincidence, I had decided this week to read Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's and then watch the film again.

I might also repeat a famous Wilde quote:

There are two ways to dislike poetry. One is to dislike it, and the other is to read Pope.

Justin_K
I really felt that when Larry the janitor left in 1998 is when the decline started.
csa
I miss Larry. Backbone of the org.
traceroute66
I agree, El Reg is a shadow of its former self.

There has been a decline in quality with obvious errors caused by poor research or rushed publishing. There has been an increase in sponsored copy, and also a marked hardening of its already notorious Apple bashing.

There have also been a number of occasions where they've simply missed reporting on important topics altogether.

Also on their forums, there has been a decline in quality of contributions. For a while it still used to be worth going to El Reg just to read the forums, but even that is becoming increasingly pointless.

bxparks
Funny enough, I stopped reading the Register after a few attempts because I disliked its headlines and tone. "To each his own" I guess.
rwmj
You have to see it in the context of British tabloids (mass-readership, low-brow newspapers), especially of the 80s and 90s. The Register was emulating this style of irreverant journalism. For example have a look at some Sun headlines: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/3654446.stm
CommieBobDole
Yeah, that's exactly why I never really got into the site; I got the joke, it just seemed weirdly awkward and off-putting, like having a coworker who talks like a pirate all day, every day. It's funny at first, but it drives you crazy after a while.
asddubs
if they do it long and consistently enough i think i would oscillate between finding it funny and driving me crazy
ghaff
And particularly if you were on the receiving end of a bit of excessive snark you sort of ended up having to talk people down that it's just The Reg being The Reg. And, of course, if you follow that style, you will overdo it not infrequently. I could name a few people on Twitter like that.

It can be funny but it can also get in the way of serious points you want to make.

runxel
Funny enough, as a person whose native language is not English, The Register always went above my head. I knew it was meant to be snarky or funny, but it always left me stumbling and I never was quite sure if not the whole page was just an elaborate shitjoke.
LetMeInNowMate
As a Brit: Can I suggest this is not because your native language isn't English.... but is beacuse you are unfamiliar with our rather sly sense of humour?
nottorp
As a non native speaker who has watched everything Monty Python and read everything Adams and Pratchett (in English, i mean they're translatable but it's a HARD job), I loved the old El Reg.

When they changed tone i just thought they got bought out and gave up.

LorenDB
When I saw this, I thought "probably about the changing of the header to black instead of red" (presumably due to Queen Elizabeth's death?).
bennyp101
I used to visit it everyday from the early 2000's, but I don't think I have really visited in the last 3-4 years. I can't put a finger on it, but the writing and then subsequently the comments (which were always fun) kinda started falling off.

I still have it in my bookmark bar, but as I still cant get the favicon to load properly in Firefox, I forget to click on it :)

josefresco
Same here. Used to be a daily for me, then for some reason I dropped it and completely forgot about it until this post. Maybe around the time Digg imploded? I'm not sure.
speedbird
Same. Used to really like some of the old stuff, like Lewis’s, but these days I only visit if an item is linked from here.
Angostura
Ah, Lewis’ old diatribes about how climate change was trash.
NKosmatos
Yeap, I agree. I've been reading technological news from El Reg since around 2000 and their writing style has changed a lot, it's not as humorous as it used to be.

Once of the only reasons to visit them nowadays is for the BOFH (new episode every Friday): https://www.theregister.com/offbeat/bofh/

hn_go_brrrrr
BOFH hasn't been every week since the mid-00s. I wish it were!
trelane
Eh, there's only so much of that to be had. At some point, it becomes formulaic.
jamal-kumar
Didn't they make some grand announcement about shutting down a few years ago?

I can see how someone might not allow that to happen and then just milk the thing.

diodesign
You're probably thinking of TheInquirer.net, which was founded by a co-founder of The Register, and shut down in the past few years.

C.

secondcoming
It hasn't been the same since around the time Andrew Orlowski left.

The politics (identity and anti-Trump reddit-style) stuff crept in too, especially from its San Fran office, but you could obviously just choose to ignore those articles. It's not something I want from a tech site though.

It's a shame, ElReg and Slashdot used be my go-to site for tech content.

gandalfian
Weirder is what happened to its successor theinquirer.net? It was bought and then erased. Who does that? Was it a copyright thing?

Otherwise theregister hit that brief window between professional magazine publishing and every teenager with a phone becoming a tech blogger, the brief window when website publishing was cheap but not yet overcrowded.

dylan604
if someone's website was "stealing" traffic from your website, then purchasing the offending site and shutting it down would be business move to eliminate competition.
BMc2020
digg dot com, metafilter dot com, reddit dot com, craigslist dot com - all still around but I no longer go to them because they have changed so much.
DanAtC
Fark still feels about the same
standyro
It’s not 2006 anymore
rnd0
Sadly, no it is not.
jacooper
Personally I have just discovered the Register this year, and I like them a lot.

I have seen how the old style was, yes it different, but I wouldn't say its a run of the mill IT website.

Its reporting is pretty good, and they have good opinion pieces, like intel optane possible revolution for IT(1), tracking obfuscation by big tech (2) and safari WebKit limiting mobile web (3) articles.

1. https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/01/optane_intel_cancella...

2. https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/23/opinion_column/

3. https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/06/big_techs_big_privacy...

There are other website like InfoWorld, which produced articles like how docker broke in half, however their website is annoying, and in general less focus on FOSS/Linux.

https://www.infoworld.com/article/3632142/how-docker-broke-i...

kitd
The reporting is fine. The commenters do my head in tho
lproven
Don't worry -- that goes for the writers, too. ;-)
lproven
Thank you for including one of my pieces in there!
[dead] GGSec
InCityDreams
"It's crept back onto my lists recently"

Wrists (line 1), or you did actually mean 'lists'?

...given the '....suicide headlines'.

?

oxff
It is like reading articles made by language model.
Andwalle
Andrew Orlowski! He writes for the Daily Telegraph, which is the UKs equivalent of Fox News. Everything is uphill from there
jen20
The Sun is the UK equivalent of Fox News.
Veen
The Telegraph is nothing like Fox News, except insofar as it is a center-right publication. The tone, quality, and perspective are utterly different.
MandieD
The Telegraph is more like the Wall Street Journal, yet another Murdoch-owned media property.

The Daily Express is like Fox News.

NGRhodes
They had a great formula. Used to get some good scoop, a humorous spin whilst having a decent level of factual accuracy. Sadly, they now need to compete with social media and memes, the newer generations of internet user treat websites as a secondary source of news and entertainment.
rvbissell
So their solution to that shift in their market is to become more stodgy?
johnklos
I noticed the change right around the time they stopped having a distinct landing page for "theregister.co.uk", which I preferred because of their slightly more provincial bent, and instead started redirecting everyone, everywhere to "theregister.com".

It's sad, because much of its appeal was precisely how different they were from common IT coverage that was and still is mostly written for non-IT types.

rseech01
The Register used to be required reading for BOFH. More oriented to folks in the UK, but I used to enjoy this series. If you have some time to kill check out some of the articles.
jasonlotito
> Does anybody know what caused this transformation?

Maybe this?

> I used to visit The Register almost every day up until a few years ago.

Years of not going

> I visited it again a week or two ago,

donpott
Do you mean that the "old" style didn't make it commercially viable, and the "new" one does?

I would disagree. At least before I would visit it intermittently whenever I remembered it existed. Now I have zero interest in ever visiting it again.

jasonlotito
You disagree, but even you admit that the old style was something you rarely, if ever, visited. So, when they try to determine what their users enjoy, what you enjoy won't get counted as much.

> Now I have zero interest in ever visiting it again.

You barely had any interest in visiting in the first place. You don't build a commercially viable product by catering to people who routinely do not use you.

You can disagree, but again, you didn't visit for years at a time, so it doesn't matter.

donpott
That's a fair point. I'm finding the thread interesting because it has helped divorce my personal experience from (some of) the english-speaking tech community at large.

For me, a theme that's arising is that the previous style was pretty polarising, but at the same time it was a differentiator. Now, it's neither of those.

It appears that this works better for them commercially, too; so more power to them.

no-dr-onboard
Sad to see it turn this way.

Now if we want to tounge-in-cheek tech humour, we are left with. . . techdirt.com?

iso1631
Oh, interesting, I might have to start reading it. I used to read it back in the late 90s and early 00s but the tabloid style put me off

(I assume this is the .com is the same as theregister.co.uk -- the place that bought BOFH etc)