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Comment by JKCalhoun | Hacker News Reader

Popular Science, Popular Mechanics — even just the covers of the magazines exuded a kind of optimism. It was going to be a brave new future ... you can learn to do this yourself ... you can understand it ... you can make this in your garage...

Unfortunately the future kind of caught up with it.

Or maybe as an adult when I became an engineer some of the mystique of tech evaporated when it became my job five days a week?

But in the 70's and 80's when I was perhaps of a more impressionable age (or when maybe the future itself was more measurable) it fueled my curiosity and did impart a kind of optimism that will be missed.

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I got the impression that the quality was on a long slow decline from initially nearly professional science quality articles to something not quite as bad as the modern discovery channel.

Surely the mystique evaporates for “popular” publications targeted at people with less experience, but that just means you need to level up what you consume. Physics Today is something to look into today.

The media i want to consume is mostly of the “this was written for people on the level of graduate students, but ones in a different field”. I can’t find a lot of it

This has been true for a lot of publications I used to like to read. Wired, Time, Sports Illustrated all are much, much worse today than I remember them being 20 years ago. I don’t know if that’s me or a genuine change in their quality.

This is quite in line with what I remember as well (and have verified by looking through many old editions recently). I think this is just the outcome of modern business practices in the US. It's a race to the bottom of quality, while making that bottom line top out.

Everyone takes the short term safe course, make a thing a little bit worse to make a little bit more money, don’t take risks with things that might be high quality that maybe only a few will appreciate.

The result is a long slow decline which is profitable until you’re dying and can’t climb back out. This is, I am sure, an explicit strategy of some. The whole business model of taking something good and lowering quality while relying on the good will from the past until it’s all out and you’re bankrupt… except you’ve been doing whatever you could to extract profit from the whole process and just leaving the business bankrupt.

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