When Salon first started up, I was in my early 20s and it was a Big Deal. There were several years where I made it a point to at least skim, if not fully read, every single thing that came across the front page.
The media landscape has changed, and in the intervening years salon.com went from being a first-order site for me to being a site I checked when I was bored. There were sometimes some interesting bits of information to pick up so it wasn’t a total waste of time, but for the most part it felt like it was devolving.
Then, tonight, this.
The author is certainly very good at her job, in the sense that it made me click through, but it makes me feel like a jackass for having been a part of it.
A Pun Involving Travel 
Salon has gone steadily downhill over the past 10 years or so. My favorite writers on Salon, like Patrick Smith (Ask The Pilot), and others whose names escape me now, have all moved on to other things; and the site has steadily had more and more crummy intrusive ads and worse writing.
Now there’s mostly stupid articles from Patrick L. Smith (the leftist polemicist / Putin apologist) and H.A. Goodman; and stuff that was originally on Alternet; and entire articles that basically say “Paul Krugman said this and this and this, and I totally agree and Paul Krugman is great” — articles which are pointless to read because you might as well just go read Krugman directly! I think the only good stuff left is Digby.
Why has Salon become so steadily terrible? Because they don’t make any money. They can’t afford quality content. Either they never figured out how to monetize their audience, or a distaste for capitalism and commerce made them ignore the problem until it was too late.
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