If they go this far, it won’t be a surprise if all of their articles is AI garbage
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
Oof.
I had to double take at freaking XDA!!! I had no idea.
is this why xda became shit?
Valnet writers who […] reveal payment rates are alleged to be blacklisted by the company
That sounds flat out illegal.
XDA has gotten so much worse in the last 6 months it is astounding. Some unreal work is being done to kill custom android ROMs.
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.
ah man that sucks. I kinda like XDA and polygon.
You shouldn’t be allowed to own that much stuff. Simple solution.
XDA
Holy fucking shit no wonder it appears that they sold out
Cause they DID.
poor Polygon
I always liked polygon…
XDA ? Do they run the forums as well or?
This would have been some Photoshop 101 shit.
Why has everyone forgotten how to manually manipulate photos?
The AI version is obviously not better.
It was probably quicker to ask an AI to edit it than to make the edit personally and the writers for these sites are paid very little to churn out multiple low effort articles a day
