AFAICT in ~Dec 2024 the reasoning was that they had a paywall.
I don't know what percentage of their articles were behind a paywall back then, or the relative change to now. (Well, except for the fact that clearly some of their stuff is public today since we're looking at it.)
If I had my 'druthers, "paywall" and "register-wall" would be little icons on individual submissions. Then people would choose whether to upvote a more-accessible option instead, whether the hard-to-read stuff was still important enough to commenting on, etc.
404 Media is one of the few news organizations that actually file FOIA and fight for information in courtrooms.
By comparison, the likes of the Verge only run the most mainstream kind of articles. There is no deep, technical analysis of any complex topic. The most technical stuff they post may be those benchmarks they run for laptops. And they certainly don't file for FOIA despite how much (negative) coverage they do for US government agencies -- they leave the hard work to others.
(A quick Google search will confirm all of above.
And put your objections in comments instead of downvotes you cowards.)
You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing.
The choice is play ball with the USG, or be dead in the water. Once you’re large enough, simply abiding by the laws is insufficient to remain unmolested - you must actively play ball or you’ll find that suddenly a TON of regulations now apply to you that didn’t before.
Do you think Apple or SpaceX like dealing with the NSA/CSS/CIA? Or the CCP for that matter? (Apple has backdoored all of iCloud in China for the CCP to be allowed to operate there.) Coinbase and the IRS is one. All the telcos turn over all call metadata and IP backbone taps to the feds without a warrant. Google Joseph Nacchio to see what happens if they don’t.
They’re the only game in town, and you gotta play by their rules if you want to operate at scale at all. No amount of billions of private money will get Trump and his administration un-pissed-off at you.
It’s not a free market, all large industries entirely serve exclusively at the pleasure of the court. This is why we overpay for broadband in every major market, why we overpay for mobile data nationwide, why retail banking sucks, etc.
And the boycott is to deliberately inflict a narcissistic injury to Trump. His attempt to create a state-owned news outlet is an attempt to reduce/minimize that injury. Personally, I think the best defense by the media would be to display his senile rambling conversations - show everyone how insane his actual words are.
Which is a really lazy way of looking at the world. If you haven't been paying attention, Trump kicked CNN and a couple others out of the press room, and the rest of the networks banded together to say "nu uh". That's not to say the head of the board of media companies aren't compromised, just that there's more nuance than that.
