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Posted by mkeeter 2 days ago

Goodbye from Salon(www.salon.com)
651 points | 268 commentspage 2
alexpotato 2 days ago|
Went to some of my favorite bookmarked Salon.com articles and:

"410 Gone

This page was part of the old salon.com site and has been removed."

Pretty sure that's the first time I've ever seen 410 in the wild.

mellosouls 2 days ago||
Salon used to have a terrific forum, with some of the most brilliant contributors I've seen on the web in their "International Issues" section.

One day without warning, they deleted it.

Complete contempt for writers who were frankly far superior to any on staff. I was just a lurker, I've no personal investment beyond that.

I can't remember the last time since that that I visited the site with intent; the arrogant, contemptuous destruction of brilliant writing - that's Salon's legacy for me.

LightBug1 2 days ago|
The amount of early 2000's forums I can tell a similar story about is incredible ... companies willingly just jettisoning their audience.

It's either killing off forums completely, or "upgrading" to the point of being unrecognisable, or requiring everyone to make a new account and ... I can't even be bothered to write it.

TFNA 2 days ago||
Old-school corporation-run internet forums being killed off in the 2010s was usually due to costs of moderation (IMDB, Amazon) or brand-protection reasons (Lonely Planet) or both.

At the time, I was angry at this as a user. But looking back, the forums would have declined anyway. With most people today using the internet from phones, and younger generations chiefly interested in video, there just isn't the same societal support for thoughtful long-form text typed from a computer keyboard. The surviving independent forums I'm on are greying out at best, or have shrunk to a few cantankerous or dotty people at worse.

Sprotch 2 days ago||
Wow, blast from the past! I think the last time I read a Salon article was 20 years ago. They used to be staple of the old internet. I miss those days…
mscarpino 2 days ago||
Very sad. Loved the articles from Stephanie Zacharek, Camille Paglia, and Cary Tennis.
jeffhwang 2 days ago||
I read Paul Krugman's 1990s columns in Slate (which I always associated with Salon as 2 similar competitors with S-names) before he became a lot better known for writing similar columns in The NY Times!
polymork 2 days ago||
Don’t forget Glen Greenwald before he went batshit crazy.

I payed for salon briefly in the late 90s. I used to have bets with how many words it would take Paglia to cite Sexual Personnae in literally every one of here articles.

Then it just turned into everything that is cringe about the anti intellectual left. Don’t get me wrong I’ve always been aligned with progressive politics for all 56 years of my life, but Salon just went off the deep end.

RickJWagner 2 days ago|||
I agree.

I’m imagining the shutdown was timed for right after midterm elections ( and not before ) so Salon could exercise influence through that event.

glenstein 2 days ago||||
Came here to say this. The main reason I cared about Salon at all was they basically had peak Greenwald.
kristopolous 2 days ago|||
and just to be clear in case people missed it, here's an apt story

https://www.salon.com/2022/10/07/glenn-greenwalds-bromance-w...

mixmastamyk 2 days ago|||
It’s a long article that complains he wasn’t mean enough to Jones in person and has been on the old Carlson show? Anything better?
kristopolous 2 days ago||
Yeah sure, there's a knowledge fight episode on it.

Greenwald did promotional appearances with Jones

https://knowledgefight.libsyn.com/709-2-dans-2-war

He's also done collaborations with Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes and broadcasts on Rumble, the far right version of YouTube where scammers, bigots and hatemongers banned from YouTube go

Even if you agree with those people's politics they aren't investigative journalists. They are sensationalist provocateurs and merchants of spectacle - The internet's equivalent of the tabloid broadsheet

There was this phenomena during covid if you recall where people become radicalized to extremism, conspiracies and delusion, isolating themselves from their loved ones. There's a subreddit for it, qanon casualties.

Seems to have happened to Glenn. It's like the Pulitzer version of the Nobel disease.

https://www.mediaite.com/opinion/glenn-greenwald-offers-biza...

mixmastamyk 2 days ago|||
Thanks. I wasn't paying attention to him five years ago, so will look at those. But I did watch a recent talk between him and Carlson and it was excellent: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoBTkpus8Iw

When someone says "GG's crazy," I typically hear "I'm an angry lefty" who's upset he's not on my team any more. I don't think he was ever on anyone's side, one of the things I like about a journalist. He simply came up during the Dubya years and they were the default target. He's still anti-war, the most important position.

matltc 2 days ago|||
And when I hear "GG's crazy"

https://share.google/DzxpUJN6Ss31AIhDt

kristopolous 2 days ago|||
no. He used to do right-to-reply, no longer does.

He used to do two-source rule, no longer does.

He used to provide contextual clarity, no longer does.

He used to disclose conflict of interests, no longer does.

He used to provide citations and audit trails for his work, no longer does.

Every single rule from the society of professional journalists he's thrown out the window. Here he is pushing conspiracy drivel with a bunch of emdashes: https://substack.com/home/post/p-222186026

I mean look at this: "After the first round of voting, it is true that a Lula victory was unlikely. And last night’s outcome was a surprise even when viewed through the prism of traditional polling and analytical metrics."

No it's not. There's plenty of actual journalism on this: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/nov/05/unsung-heroes-...

Yet here he is in the article doing stolen election bullshit: "What I do think is vital to note, however, is that there were election irregularities in the vote last night, and they illustrate one of the worst legacies of Lula’s last four years."

Oh really Glen? Do you have direct knowledge sources? Documents as evidence? Anyone willing to go on record? Journalism doesn't involve wildly unfounded conspiracies. Keep that on TLC.

And look at this:

"The court last night approved a request from Lula’s campaign to extend by two hours the close of Brazil’s voting."

Once again, this isn't journalism. Both candidates requested it. https://valorinternational.globo.com/politics/news/2026/10/2...

Then the losing candidate called it nonsense even though he requested it and he got what he requested. But Glen is more than happy to play along with this obvious deception in an AI-written partisan hackery that he ostensibly charges people for reading.

I could go on, but this is unequivocally not journalism.

Compare that to the place he left covering the same event: https://theintercept.com/2026/10/27/flavio-bolsonaro-trump-v...

See how they follow all those rules and he does not anymore?

mixmastamyk 2 days ago|||
I see nothing with any of these pieces linked above, to make me think they are 1) definitely wrong or 2) the author has gone "crazy."

We may quibble over quality, or standards, laziness, but you seem to be rather invested. No one is right all the time, and there is opinion in his piece. Take with a grain of salt.

Not to mention in a country as big as Brazil, anything could and probably did happen, at least at a small scale. GG is living there, I've been there, and the articles did not seem obviously wrong.

I'll keep my eyes peeled however.

hobo123 2 days ago|||
Oh you mean lazy. He went lazy, fair enough.
mixmastamyk 2 days ago|||
Ok, had a chance to look at those. I'll tell you why they aren't very convincing. They are a third-party telling you what to think. The second article is 90% about RFK. Again GG wasn't critical enough of him for the author.

The podcast (so far, not heard the whole thing) is angry someone tried to make a non-judgemental documentary and/or interview.

Also, you mention Rumble without mentioning why he went elsewhere—censorship during Biden administration. These examples suggest a common lefty myopia.

Instead, I would have expected an article or video where GG directly supports a batshit position. Rather than a simple constitutional freedom of speech position where he allows an unsavory person airtime. At very least a direct link to the source material.

Bud 2 days ago|||
[dead]
kristopolous 2 days ago|||
Many of the prominent people who went to rumble who got banned from YouTube were doing things like cryptocurrency pump and dumps, cyberbullying and severe targeted harassment with in person assault, targeted attacks and calls to violence, illegal money laundering... you know, crime

Crime stuff. YouTube kicked them because they're a legal liability for YouTube, not because mask wearing pronoun police tsk tsked and wagged a shame finger.

No. This is what a platform with lawyers does when they realize they're platforming crime.

Conservatives need to find a kind of conservatism that doesn't require them constantly running cover to defend obvious con artists, pedophiles, rapists and frauds as they go in and out of prison for things like sex trafficking.

Eject them from your movement like William Buckley did. Being known as the group that champions beating women, committing fraud and yelling slurs isn't a winning strategy.

It's like how libertarians need to get rid of those "age of consent" guys. Campaigning for making piddling children legal doesn't win...

Just my opinion

mixmastamyk 2 days ago||
Ok, yet none of these things describe GG.
glenstein 2 days ago|||
He also dabbled in vaccine skepticism and apologetics for Jan 6th. It was good while it lasted.
lastdong 2 days ago||
On my internship the local newspaper wanted a revamped UI and I was asked to present some ideas. After searching around for references found Salon had a really clean UI and added some of its pages to the presentation spec. This was in early 2000s. Their UI today is still very clean and readable. I don’t think it has changed that much :) https://web.archive.org/web/20021130080643/http://salon.com/ Sad to see them go.
benbayard 2 days ago||
Independent journalism shutting down is really tragic. One of the OG internet publications.
tptacek 2 days ago||
Punditry is a kind of journalism, but far from the most important kind; what people get from Salon today they can get better from a hundred different newsletters.
PaulHoule 2 days ago||
I think the most damning fact about the readers of The New York Times is that they're much more interested in the opinion page (which is just Charlie Blow blowing it out his ass) than they are in the actual reporting which might concern some people you don't know in some place you never heard of that did something that involves a lot of explaining.
tyre 2 days ago||
This is Maureen Dowd erasure. Please respect one of the GOATs of vapid, internally-inconsistent nonsense. She's an absolute legend.

Nor can we forget David Brooks, the moralizing conservative who left his wife for his research assistant 24 years his junior.

David French accusing Mayor Pete of fixing bread prices, Lulu Garcia-Navarro with more glasses than good faith questions, etc.

Say what you will, but the NYT has a deep bench of shenanigans. They truly love the game.

tptacek 2 days ago|||
David French is a weird person to single out here. Dowd and Brooks don't have any real identities outside of being vapid pundits; French is a former movement conservative (and litigator) who was defenestrated for opposing the rise of Trump. You don't have to like him --- I don't read him --- but he's not really at all like Dowd or Brooks. When you make that comparison, you weaken your point, because it sounds like your real problem with NYT opinion staffing is that it includes right-of-center voices.

If you just wanted people to agree with you, Salon definitely had you covered!

tyre 2 days ago|||
You think that based on my view that the NYT Opinion section is a clown car, I therefore want to only read people who agree with me?

The NYT happens to staff people on the intellectual right, which is whatever. It's a core part of who they are. My issue is lack of intellectual rigor.

PaulHoule 1 day ago||
I can say personally I like David Brooks a lot more than I liked him 10 years ago but he left the Times to go work for The Atlantic.
easterncalculus 2 days ago|||
Genuinely have no idea what you’re talking about. David French joined NYT in 2023 and was already an independent. He is not at all a foil and is basically in lockstep with his more left of center cohosts like Jamelle Bouie (who is apparently a fascist, according to the median Bluesky poster). This idea that he’s a right of center contributor to NYT is based entirely on work from before he was there. The only person who was right of center in NYT opinion was Ross Douthat and he’s already gone.
paulpauper 2 days ago|||
David brooks was never that heavy on moralizing, imho. He was more of an idealist who saw a vision for society that he conceded could never be realized , but was content with people otherwise acting in accordance with their incentives and preferences.
okeuro49 2 days ago|||
Substack is booming.
paulpauper 2 days ago|||
it's amazing how much long form content there is over the past 5 years, especially the past 2. my reading list is so flooded I have given up
ghaff 2 days ago||||
Booming is a relative term. I would have to see how many writers are making a "living wage," a favored term of people in tech circles which generally means a fraction of what they make.
paulpauper 2 days ago||
it's just a blogging platform + newsletter service. There was never an expectation ppl would make a living income from it, except for only the top. But it's like this with almost everything in life.
solyin 2 days ago|||
Yes there was. The monetization was why it wasn't medium.com. Friend of a friend is a substack writer. 50k subscribers that pay $10/month for her insights.
paulpauper 2 days ago||
I said "except for only the top." With 50k subscribers, presumably this is in the top tier. Similar to medium, the average person who creates a substack blog has to get all the traffic on their own, substakc does not help .
aquentinn 1 day ago||
Why do they host it on there then, can't they just get a domain and own their data/content?
ghaff 1 day ago|||
Some short answers are ease and discoverability. I use Blogger myself after fiddling around some mostly because it was easier (and a bit cheaper) than setting up and hosting something myself.
paulpauper 1 day ago|||
It's a blogging platform built around an app , which is like a quasi-social network in its own right.
ghaff 2 days ago|||
>except for only the top. But it's like this with almost everything in life.

For creatives, however you care to define the term, probably. But there are a lot of professions where fairly run of the mill professionals and even tradespeople still make a pretty decent living even if they're not partners in their organizations or own their own businesses. Of course, you get down to the tier that's doing taxes at Walmart or working in an auto parts store, not so much, although probably still more reliable income than the average Substack writer.

throwaway2037 2 days ago|||
I agree. In the last 10 years, a huge number of popular independent journalists and pundits (opinion writers) have moved to Substack. For me, in 2026, it is the OnlyFans of blogging.
linhns 2 days ago|||
Sadly, it ceased to be that way for a long time.
paulpauper 2 days ago|||
independent journalism is on substack, twitter , tiktok or other social media
vlyan 2 days ago|||
>Independent journalism

you mean this?

https://www.google.com/search?q=white%20people%20site%3Asalo...

MonkeyClub 2 days ago||
If it sells, you sell it and make money.

In fact, you sell it in all colors and make more money:

https://www.google.com/search?q=black+people+site%3Asalon.co...

It doesn’t have to be good, it just has to sell.

But then someone democratizes the publishing (Substack).

Someone else then mechanizes the producing (LLMs).

And you no longer sell.

Bummer.

vlyan 2 days ago||
the tone is very different, don't you think?

https://www.salon.com/2015/12/22/white_men_must_be_stopped_t...

MonkeyClub 2 days ago||
Slightly, but that was the custom at the time.
vlyan 1 day ago||
lol, yeah, exactly.

knowing that most of them had already been replaced with diverse individuals prompting an inclusive LLM for equitable $2/hr pleases me immeasurably.

DonHopkins 2 days ago||
All the good news web sites got fucked, and their best stories and documenteries have been taken down, even from the archives, by thin skinned people who don't want them told.

I miss suck.com.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suck.com

Suck.com Net.Moguls Internet Mogul Trading Cards:

https://web.archive.org/web/20181211075708/http://www.suck.c...

Rick Adams, Front:

https://web.archive.org/web/20180802115113im_/http://www.suc...

Rick Adams, Back:

https://web.archive.org/web/20180802143444im_/http://www.suc...

And the hard hitting funny-because-its-true parody from fuckedcompany.com.

Fucked Company published an excellent documentary on the Digital Entertainment Network.

(It's from "Fucked Company", so obviously it's NOT SAFE FOR WORK, but who's at work any more these days?)

Classic Dot-Com Era Fucked Company Brock Pierce DEN (Digital Entertainment Network) Documentary:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W41Ttr73TqU

>Dot Com Boom & Bust - Digital Entertainment Network

>A parody of the founders of Digital Entertainment Network. DEN was "a quintessential example of the excesses and lack of control of the dot-com craze."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Entertainment_Network

I rescued this from the Internet Archive before it got taken down, and it was originally posted on the Fuckedcompany.com website, which went defunct in 2007.

Yes, THAT creepy MAGA Bannon Epstein good buddy pedo crypto shill guy, Brock Pierce, who turns into a banana at 20:30 in this video:

Cryptocurrencies: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6iDZspbRMg&t=19m42s

Brock Pierce's Relationship With Jeffrey Epstein Went Deeper Than Anyone Knew:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/brock-pierces-relationsh...

Fucked Company:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucked_Company

Oh no :(, the Internet Archive fucked them:

https://web.archive.org/web/2/http://www.fuckedcompany.com/

>Sorry.

>This URL has been excluded from the Wayback Machine.

Alternative alternative archive of the front page, only existing in the web.archive.org snapshot of wayback.archive-it.org snapshot of fuckedcompany.com:

https://web.archive.org/web/20240326164342/https://wayback.a...

Then they went from sorta fucked:

https://wayback.archive-it.org/all/20091016001955/http://www...

To fucked:

https://wayback.archive-it.org/all/20130104195206/http://www...

felixgallo 2 days ago||
hotwired, suck, boing boing, CNET, digg, slashdot, segfault, geocities, flickr...
ghaff 2 days ago||
I still subscribe to flickr but it basically exists on the back of Smugmug and I'm not sure how long that can keep going.
imron 2 days ago||
What happens to the articles?

Salon hosts one of my favourite short stories that still holds up 24 years later: https://www.salon.com/2002/08/28/0wnz0red/

Read it while it's still there.

kin 2 days ago||
https://web.archive.org/web/20261106005638/https://www.salon...
cowlevel 2 days ago||
If you love it, download it now, and upload it somewhere.

Your choice to do the whole page or just copypaste the story.

billforsternz 2 days ago||
It's kind of weird, if you just go to Salon's home page, there's no inkling of this announcement. They still want you to "Go Premium", there's a heap of midterms post-mortem material etc. Does one hand not know what the other is doing?"
unfocused 2 days ago||
Wow! I met my future wife on the salon personals back in 2006. Her profile was on theonion and I guess they used to merge the profiles. I think there were like 30 profiles for my entire city back then! Went on a date and the rest is history.

Goodbye Salon! Thanks for the dating help!

danh1979 2 days ago||
This is exactly how my wife and I met! Same sentiment. We still read The Onion, at least
mixmastamyk 2 days ago||
Oh yeah, I remember that. It was the same backend company running the dating for many sites.
user2722 2 days ago|
I've just "now" re-re-retried to read a newspaper on PDF sitting on my couch. It's bearable mostly because I'm stubborn. It's also not best because I'm stubborn: I use my 2-in-1 Linux laptop for it and dislike dynamic pages for "old" media. So PDF it is -- which can have issues when dragging, so I use newspapers' websites which clone or use Pressreader.

Idk what I meant to say, but don't count newspapera out, yet. A small but non-loosing cadre of sellers and buyers ecosystem may still exist.

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