Ask HN: What happened to theregister.com?

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...

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.

Mike Magee was co founder of the Register and established its style. He left in 2001, and the Register has been declining ever since.

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.

Funny enough, I stopped reading the Register after a few attempts because I disliked its headlines and tone. "To each his own" I guess.