The Awl, 2009-2018 | Hacker News Reader

The Awl, 2009-2018

theawl.com

87 pointsmountainplus16 comments

For a flavor of the content that is being reminisced, an old favorite: https://www.theawl.com/2011/11/a-conspiracy-of-hogs-the-mcri...

this is one of the greatest articles I've ever read on the internet

It says so much about so many things so simply.

I really loved how The Hairpin, Awl, and Toast brought back the bloggy atmosphere other sites and publications abandoned.

Hopefully we'll still love to see quirky CMSes that hark back to the good old days of Blogspot, Typepad, and LiveJournal.

It's not the CMS. It's not the layout. It's the writing, first, last, and always.

It was both. The minimalist layout allowed the writing to stand out.

The ethos of the creators is what led to both.

RIP

A fantastic website that rekindled the spirit of my early web experience reading Suck, et. al. It published an uncanny number of unpublished writers that would create ballyhooed careers. More importantly, they, uniquely, published numerous people that would write one fantastic piece and didn’t chase a writing career (leaving everything out on the proverbial field).

It had a good period of influence with some cool stories and writers, but I honestly hadn't come across a story from The Awl organically since around 2015.

I personally stopped reading when they switched from Wordpress to Medium - found out recently that they switched back after a year, but it was too late at that point.

Similarly, I abandoned The Onion and AV Club when they were acquired by Univision and moved to "Kinja".

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. They killed their community and turned all their content to sludge.

Agreed. AV Club is a gossip rag now. The Onion is spot on and hilarious as usual, but Kinja is a terrible discovery and reading experience so I don't blame you.

The Awl and Hairpin were destined to die because the people who wrote/would write for them would never be satisfied being poor past their 20's.

It was a 'labor of love' from the glamorous set.

Maybe I'm weird but it seemed like there was always just too much stuff being published daily? The Verge is like this too. Anyway, the stuff I did manage to get at was always good.

Sad to see The Awl go away. I've really enjoyed it the last couple years. Best of luck to the team!

Perhaps you could have cut some running costs by not using images with 12MB (displayed as 461x151 px) on the main page?

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