If they go this far, it won't be a surprise if all of their articles is AI garbage

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[–] 214 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (25 children)

Gamerant is owned by Valent, which bought out and owns all the following:

Android Police, Comic Book Resources, Collider, Hardcore Gamer, MovieWeb, OpenCritic, Screen Rant, Game Rant, DualShockers, TheGamer, XDA Developers, How-To Geek, GiveMeSport, And Polygon

All of the above, and I mean all of them, had huge layoffs and pivoted to AI articles and adhoc underpaid contractors:

previous and current Valnet employees claim the company prioritizes "mass quantity over quality to churn out mind-numbing SEO bait." Once websites are acquired by Valnet, the permanent staff are usually replaced by contractors, who are paid significantly less (reportedly around $19 for 1000 words at GameRant[3]) than the former tenured staff. One former contributor described Valnet website Collider to TheWrap as "a content mill, borderline like almost sweatshop-level", while another writer suggested that Valnet forced contractors to create "junky clickbait" content. Valnet writers who complain about payment, working conditions, or reveal payment rates are alleged to be blacklisted by the company

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  • [–] 45 points 4 months ago (6 children)

    ah man that sucks. I kinda like XDA and polygon.

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  • [–] 29 points 4 months ago (5 children)

    Yeah XDA is (or I guess, was) invaluable for custom ROMs for Android. There's a huge modding/coding community on XDA.

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  • [–] 9 points 4 months ago (3 children)

    Sadly the wild west days of custom ROMs is mostly over :(

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  • [–] 33 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    You say "wild west" as if they were doing something uncivilized, but running the code you choose is nothing more than exercising your property rights.

    The marginalization/destruction of custom ROMs isn't civilization catching up, it's totalitarianism closing in.

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  • [–] 11 points 4 months ago

    Another way of viewing the use of "wild west" was exactly that, the lack of over regulation and a more hands off government. In reality it wasn't the utopia some want to make it out to be as slang like "snake oil salesmen" alludes.

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  • [–] 13 points 4 months ago

    Oooh that's why all their articles in my feed are utter garbage, made the mistake of clicking a few and my god my phones built in feed is now inundated.

    Like I mean easy to ignore and I don't even know if video game "journalism" even counts as something worth reading most of the time anyways not that kind of blows.

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  • [–] 5 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    I had to double take at freaking XDA!!! I had no idea.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago

    If you've seen some of the half baked articles coming from there over the last year, you wouldn't be surprised at all. There's still some interesting stuff but there's a lot of half assed trash articles as well. I saw this and immediately everything made sense lol.

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  • [–] 4 points 4 months ago (2 children)