Kotaku EIC Resigns Over New Editorial Edict
Kotaku EIC Resigns Over New Editorial Edict
Kotaku EIC Jen Glennon resigned Thursday, citing a deprioritzation of news in favor of guides content at the G/O Media-owned gaming site.
fta “Kotaku's staff will be expected to create 50 guides a week at the site.”
Yeah, I’d quit too. I mean, aren’t they just going to be drowning each other out at that point?
31Looks like they're trying to compete with AI spam.
Either that or trying to push their staff to use AI without saying it.
10I would guess the latter. That's 10 guides a day. An even somewhat useful guide would take 5 days alone to research and write I would estimate.
What they want is the slew of spam-AI-generated "Here's how to obtain the third rusty shortsword in age of calamity"-"guides" where it's 5-10 pages of always the same overly verbose prose that's totally not done by an LLM, no no. And there's like 4 words of content in the whole article, about something utterly menial. And these guides exist for every single of 15000 items, in every single video game. Of course they do.
3
Hold on? Do I get this right?
By guides they mean actual guides for games? Like that stuff that I and literally any other person look up on YouTube and go for the shortest video available? Or, in more complex cases, go straight to the Wiki ignoring any other site that is just there to waste my time? Please tell me I am wrong.
“I've resigned from Kotaku and Jim Spanfeller is an herb.”
Someone give this woman a medal. Fantastic.
Edit: Forget what I said. They actually mean THAT by guides. It says it in the article, my brain just jumped a paragraph. Derp.
Oh boy! Let’s see how this will turn out for Kotaku!
11Ign or strategy wiki are my first go when I'm stuck at a game. I can't skim videos and game wikis usually have more information than what I want at that moment (spoilers and such).
13Yeah, I get you. Maybe it's more of a personal preference. As someone who, in most cases, is relatively indifferent to spoilers, I prefer other sources.
I still think Kotaku is fucking up right now, tho.
4
I stopped following Kotaku years ago. It was the best news site by a large stretch. At some point it quickly became trash in the lapse of a few months.
Regarding the writing guides galore, the same has just happened to Destructoid during this very week, suddenly my feed was flooded with dozens of clickbait "how to de X in [trendy game name]". I just stopped following them right away.
Now I only have Gemstsu to check news and it is not particularly good, guess sooner than later my only source of new game releases will be the from page of Steam:(
10It became trash when they had a site redesign that made it more blog post looking than news site. At the same time, they doubled down on filler articles.
After reading the article, it sounds like they're at it again with a redesign.
4
Kotaku is still a thing?
5Yeah I stopped browsing there after they had their digg moment when they did a site redesign that no one liked, and focused on clickbaity non-articles as filler. Oh and their moderation on their community became really bullshit. Banning anyone who disagreed with their takes.
5
Wow. I can't count how many sites I've blocked from my newsreader because I was flooded with "How to find Rupees in Zelda" articles that are so basic as to be ridiculous. At the rate of 50 per week, that's all you'll get.
I actually do like guides like "How to find the secret underground vault and its 3 keys", but I don't want them in my news feed. I want them to be there when I search the site or Google.
4Where does everyone get their gaming news?
2From my own statistics how many I feel worthy posting/linking on Lemmy, the most direct alternative to Kotaku is Eurogamer. PCGamer, PCGamesN and Rock Paper Shotgun are occasionally OK, but you have to cut through a lot of spam and clickbait (i.e. exactly this “50 guides per week” type of corporate guidance). Not sure if this is also the state that Kotaku will end up in. The Verge sometimes also have good articles, but the flood of gadget consumerism articles there is obnoxious.
3Primarily RockPaperShotgun, with some overall overview from bluesnews.
2