Polygon, The Verge’s sister site dedicated to gaming and entertainment, has been sold by Vox Media to Valnet, a company that owns brands like ScreenRant, GameRant, and Android Police. Some Polygon staffers will continue with the publication under its new owner, while others have been laid off, according to posts online and an internal message sent to Vox Media employees.

Valnet owns more than 27 different brands that cover areas like entertainment, gaming, sports, and travel. A recent report from TheWrap includes one former contributor to a site under Valnet’s purview describing conditions as “almost sweatshop-level.”

“Perfectly aligned with Valnet’s long-term growth strategy, Polygon will now integrate Valnet’s Gaming Portfolio, which includes industry-leading publications such as Game Rant, TheGamer, Fextralife, OpenCritic, DualShockers, and HardcoreGamer,” the company said in a press release. “This addition follows Valnet’s recent acquisition of FextraLife earlier this year, further strengthening its position in the gaming media landscape. With Valnet’s proven operational excellence, Polygon is poised to reach new editorial heights through focused investment and innovation.”

Vox Media CEO Jim Bankoff said in a statement that “this transaction will enable us to focus our energies and investment resources in other priority areas of growth across our portfolio of iconic digital publications and audio / video programming, while enabling Valnet to grow their leadership and authority in the gaming information category.” In his message to staff, Bankoff also cited the current “uncertain economic outlook” and broader changes in the gaming industry as contributing reasons to the sale.

“I’m no longer with Polygon,” says former editor-in-chief Chris Plante. “If you’re hiring, please consider the many talented writers and editors now on the market. Every one of them deserves a spot on your staff. I won’t be talking more about the sale because I wasn’t involved.”

We’ve collected additional posts from some affected staffers below.

Update, May 1st: Added posts from more Polygon staffers.

U.S. Rep. Sharice Davids, D-Kansas, characterized a House transportation committee budget bill as both cruel and reckless. She urged colleagues to work on bipartisan legislation that tackled wasteful spending without placing tax breaks for billionaires ahead of children, seniors and veterans. (Kansas Reflector screen capture from U.S. House YouTube channel)

TOPEKA — Democratic U.S. Rep. Sharice Davids of Kansas denounced Wednesday as reckless the budget proposal offered by Republicans on the House transportation and infrastructure committee.

Davids, who serves on the committee along with GOP U.S. Rep. Tracey Mann of Kansas, said the blueprint went beyond the goal of identifying wasteful government spending and amounted to a “direct attack on the people that we are here to serve.”

“I have always said I will work with anyone — Republican or Democrat — when it’s good for Kansans,” Davids said. “And, while it might seem difficult right now, I know and I believe that there is still room for common ground. But this partisan budget plan that we’re talking about today? It’s not just reckless. It is cruel.”

“We can improve government efficiency. We can reduce waste, fraud and abuse. But what we shouldn’t do is rush through chaotic policies that will raise costs for hard-working Kansans,” she said.

Davids, the lone Democrat in the state’s congressional delegation, said President Donald Trump and his allies in Congress were “pushing massive tax giveaways for billionaires instead of offering real help to the folks who need it most.”

The president seeks extension of 2017 federal tax cuts that would increase federal deficits by approximately $4 trillion during the coming decade.

“In recent months,” Davids said, “we have all seen the chaos, and simply put, we’re exhausted. This is not how the federal government should work. The dysfunction isn’t just noise — it’s hitting people where it hurts. What we’ve seen from the administration and in this budget is not strategic. It’s reckless.”

In a statement, Mann said the objective of the transportation and infrastructure committee was to add detail to a House budget package that bolstered Trump’s border and national security agenda, shelved energy policies advanced by President Joe Biden and addressed wasteful spending. This slice of the budget should also allow for investment in modernizing the nation’s air traffic control system, he said.

“Later this week, the House will vote to repeal more Biden-era rules and regulations that harm American consumers,” Mann said. “America needs an all-of-the-above energy strategy — not a one-size-fits-California mandate.”

During the House committee’s deliberations Wednesday, GOP leadership’s recommendation to set a federal vehicle registration tax was amended in wake of bipartisan opposition. Originally, the legislation required U.S. owners of an electric vehicle to pay $200 annually, owners of a hybrid vehicle to pay $100 annually and owners of other vehicles to pay $20 annually to support federal highway programs.

It was amended by the committee to set the tax on electric vehicles at $250 per year, leave the hybrid vehicle assessment at $100 annually and eliminate the proposed fee on other vehicles.

The federal gasoline tax of 18.4 cents per gallon has generated insufficient revenue for the highway trust fund as engines became more efficient and battery-powered vehicle sales escalated. The federal gas tax hasn’t been adjusted for inflation since the mid-1990s.

Google is developing a tried and true reputation for buying products people like, making them worse, then pulling the rug out from under users’ feet. That’s been a particular problem with Google’s purchase of FitBit, which has generally resulted in less useful hardware, more paywalls, more annoying nickel-and-diming efforts, and just a more miserable user experience overall.

It’s also been a pain in the ass for folks who bought into the Nest smart-home ecosystem. Google has consistently pared back on features and restricted openness for the platform, ensuring Nest doesn’t play as well with other systems. Now Google says it’s pulling software support for the first two generation of Nest thermostats (which made the brand popular in the first place), restricting a bunch of functionality:

“We made the difficult decision that starting October 25, 2025, Nest Learning Thermostat (1st gen, 2011), Nest Learning Thermostat (2nd gen, 2012), and Nest Learning Thermostat (2nd gen, Europe version, 2014) will no longer receive software updates. You will no longer be able to control them remotely from your phone or with Google Assistant, but can still adjust the temperature and modify schedules directly on the thermostat.”

Google is also stating that it has no plans to release additional Nest thermostats in Europe because it found adapting to European build requirements too much of a hassle. Google also just announced it was discontinuing the Nest Protect smoke and carbon monoxide alarm and Nest x Yale Lock.

You can argue that a decade is a reasonable expected lifespan for a product to have its support phased out, but many thermostats are historically used for decades. And Google is making absolutely no effort to open source the hardware to allow owners to explore extending the lifespan. Ultimately it’s both environmentally harmful and injures consumer relationships built over decades across brands.

Nest users in the Ars Technica and Verge forums are understandably annoyed:

“NEST is intentionally crippling a product that works well. How can I trust that they won’t do it again with other of their products?”

There’s no short term money in quality control and protecting your brand and existing relationships with consumers. So Google, chasing the impossible allure of unstoppable quarterly growth and the AI hype cycle, routinely has been cutting corners on product quality and longevity — increasingly notable in everything from its lagging interest in its own smart home line to sagging Google Search quality.

In the earlier aughts, Google was an interesting, innovative, and occasionally even ethical company. The fall off has been anything but subtle.

Roughly two weeks ago, in a post about how America was risking losing its elimination status for measles as the current outbreak is exploding thanks to the inaction from RFK Jr. and his Health and Human Services department, I wrote the following paragraph:

At the start of April, we were at 483 confirmed reported measles cases. Roughly two weeks later, we sit at 712. That’s something like a 50% increase in cases over the course of two weeks. Doubling cases ever month would cause us to easily eclipse 2019’s measles cases, the year in which we had the most cases since 2000, totaling 1,249 cases. Unless HHS and the CDC do something drastic, we could reach that number in a month or two.

Since then, the infection rate has basically kept up the pace. The country now sits with more than 900 confirmed cases of measles at least, pending any delayed reports of additional cases and putting aside the fact that the case number is almost certainly underreported. That drastic action I and health officials throughout the country called for has not happened. There has been no alteration of language or messaging coming from HHS or Kennedy. No vaccination campaigns. Hell, Kennedy’s vaunted “healers” are strolling into healthcare facilities knowing they’re infected with measles and treating patients anyway.

The end result is that we’re going to blow right past not only the record case numbers of 2019, which were largely driven by a localized outbreak among religious groups in New York, but also the next highest year in the 90s, which was before the disease achieved elimination status in America.

The cases and deaths are breaking records. In the past 30 years, the only year with more measles cases than the current tally was 2019, which saw 1,274 cases. Most of those cases were linked to large, extended outbreaks in New York City that took 11 months to quell. The US was just weeks away from losing its elimination status, an achievement earned in 2000 when the country first went 12 months without continuous transmission.

In 2019, amid the record annual case tally, cases had only reached a total of 704 by April 26. With this year’s tally already over 900, the country is on track to record a new high. Before 2019, the next highest case total for measles was in 1994. That year, the country saw 899 cases, which 2025 has already surpassed.

This is actually worse than these numbers might make it seem for two reasons. First, while the overall infection numbers might feel low to us because we just came off another pandemic that had infection numbers in the millions, it’s important to remember that we’re still in the something like the bottom of the 1st inning here if no real action is taken. The problem of infectious diseases, particularly a disease as infectious as measles, is an exponential problem. Measles cases are currently nearly doubling on a monthly basis. 900 cases today is likely to become 1,500 cases by the end of May. Then 3,000 June, or more, if the exponentiality of the increase continues.

There’s also the problem of our continuing falling vaccination rates for the MMR vaccine. So while 2019 wasn’t that long ago, thanks to vaccine skeptics (at best) like RFK Jr. and his elevation to the highest healthcare office in the land, we’re actually more vulnerable in 2025 than we were in 2019.

If current vaccination levels are maintained, the model estimated that the US will see around 850,000 measles cases over the next 25 years, with about 170,000 hospitalizations and 2,500 deaths. If vaccination levels fall by 10 percent, estimated cases in the next 25 years would rise to 11 million.

In a measles update published Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, agency researchers also warned that the US is heading backward to an era where measles is constantly present and spreading in the US.

Perhaps this whole Make America Healthy Again, or MAHA movement, needs to be renamed MAMA. Make America Measles-y Again.

The latest fad amongst tech CEOs is no longer "founder mode", or taking drugs that they would fire you for taking, or telling everybody to return to the office — it's demanding that all work be AI-first! This is a great idea if you think nobody at your company is great at what they do. It may otherwise be a suboptimal strategy. Let's dive in!

Let's use me as a case study. I'm pretty okay at writing. For example, one time I wrote a fairly technical analysis of Twitter's platform strategy that inspired Will.I.Am of the Black Eyed Peas to start Twitter beef with me two years later when he read the post and took offense to my referring to him as "nobody’s favorite rapper".

This is something your GPTs cannot do, I assure you. An average LLM won't even know that Drake's favorite MIME type is application/pdf. Chalk one up for the greatness of human creativity.

The AI-First Mind Virus

Shopify's CEO Tobi Lütke (personal motto: "what if a Canadian was all the worst things about the United States?") started the "AI-first" trend, with one of those big memos that included, amongst other things, the declaration that "We will add Al usage questions to our performance and peer review questionnaire." This is unusual — did your boss ever have to send you a memo demanding that you use a smartphone? Was there a performance review requiring you to use Slack? I'm actually old enough that I was at different workplaces when they started using spreadsheets and email and the web, and I can tell you, they absolutely didn't have to drive adoption by making people fill out paperwork about how they were definitely using the cool new technology. Isn't that interesting?

Some of the other CEOs talking about the use of AI are a little more reasonable. Duolingo's CEO Luis von Ahn seems to be trying to be somewhat more moderate in his memo, stating plainly that he doesn't see AI replacing his employees. (Though that does immediately raise the "who brought that up?" question...) Yet even in this more even-handed take, we still get the insistence that "Al use will be part of what we evaluate in performance reviews". This is really weird!

The funny thing is, I'm not saying LLMs are without their uses. Let's use me as a case study again. I'm a lousy coder, these days. I haven't had time to keep up my skills, and the area I focused on for most of my dev career (front end web development) changes particularly quickly. So I use some of the modern tools to help me get up to speed and get more done in a limited amount of time, because otherwise I'm woefully unproductive in the short windows I have to code in my free time.

To be explicit: I code on the weekends, not professionally. That means I'm not very good at it. I'm certainly nothing like the incredibly talented developers that I've had the good fortune to work with over the years. I'm just fluent enough to be able to debug the broken code that LLMs generate, or to catch the bugs that they spew out by default. And I'm sure I don't even catch all the bugs that pop up, but fortunately, I'm not making any production systems; I'm just building little toy apps and sites for myself.

This is an important illustration: AI is really good for helping you if you're bad at something, or at least below average. But it's probably not the right tool if you're great at something. So why would these CEOs be saying, almost all using the exact same phrasing, that everyone at their companies should be using these tools? Do the think their employees are all bad at their jobs?

Groupthink and signaling

Big tech CEOs and VCs really love performing for each other. We know they hang out in group chats like high schoolers, preening and sending each other texts, each trying to make sure they're all wearing the latest fashions, whether it's a gold chain or a MAGA hat or just repeating a phrase that they heard from another founder. A key way of showing that they're part of this cohort is to make sure they're having a tantrum and acting out against their workers fairly regularly.

The return to office fad was a big part of this effort, often largely motivated by reacting to the show of worker power in the racial justice activism efforts of 2020. Similarly, being AI-first shows that a company is participating in the AI trend in the "right" way, by imposing it on workers, rather than trusting workers to judge what tools are useful for them to do their jobs.

A more normal policy on AI at a company might be something like this:

Our IT department has evaluated a set of LLM tools and determined that these ones meet our requirements for security, performance, data governance, reliability, manageability and integration with our workflows. We'll be doing a controlled deployment of these tools and you can choose to use them if you think they'll help you with your work; please share your feedback on whether they are helpful, and what might make them more useful for you over time. Here are the ways these AI tools meet our corporate standards for compliance with intellectual property consent, sustainability and environmental goals, and accessibility.

This would not get you invited to the fascist VC group chat, tho!

AI-Second? Third?

How did we get here? What can we do? Maybe it starts by trying to just... be normal about technology.

There's an orthodoxy in tech tycoon circles that's increasingly referred to, ironically, as "tech optimism". I say "ironically", because there's nothing optimistic about it. The culture is one of deep insecurity, reacting defensively, or even lashing out aggressively, when faced with any critical conversation about new technology. That tendency is paired with a desperate and facile cheerleading of startups, ignoring the often equally interesting technologies stories that come from academia, or from mature industries, or from noncommercial and open source communities that don't get tons of media coverage, but quietly push forward innovating without the fame and fortune. By contrast, those of us who actually are optimistic about technology (usually because we either create it, or are in communities with those who do) are just happily moving forward, not worrying when people point out the bugs that we all ought to be fixing together.

We don't actually have to follow along with the narratives that tech tycoons make up for each other. We choose the tools that we use, based on the utility that they have for us. It's strange to have to say it, but... there are people picking up and adopting AI tools on their own, because they find them useful. This is true, despite the fact that there is so goddamn much AI hype out there, with snake oil salesman pushing their bullshit religion of magical thinking machines and overpromising that these AI tools can do tasks that they're simply not capable of performing. It's telling that the creators of so many of the AI tools don't even have enough confidence in their offerings to simply let users choose to adopt them, and are instead forcing them into users' faces in every possible corner of their apps and websites.

The strangest part is, the AI pushers don't have to lie about what AI can do! If, as they say, AI tools are going to get better quickly, then let them do so and trust that smart people will pick them up and use them. If you think your workers and colleagues are too stupid to recognize good tools that will help them do their jobs better, then... you are a bad leader and should step down. Because you've created a broken culture.

But I don't think the audience for these memos is really the people who work at these companies. I think the audience is the other CEOs and investors and VCs in the industry, just as it was for the other fads of the last few years. And I expect that AI will indeed be part of how we evaluate performance in the future, but mostly in that the way CEOs communicate to their teams about technologies like AI will be part of how we all evaluate their performance as leaders.

Kansas Rep. Ron Estes (second from right) poses with other U.S. representatives during a trip to El Salvador last week. (U.S. Embassy in El Salvador)

We do not elect kings in Kansas or the United States.

We do not dole out justice through lynch mobs or popularity contests either.

Yet there U.S. Rep. Ron Estes stood in a picture from the U.S. embassy in El Salvador, lending tacit approval to a mob that has all but condemned Maryland father Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia to death, at the behest of a would-be tyrant in Washington, D.C.

The facts of the case are simple and damning. Abrego Garcia was sent to a gulag without due process of law, and President Donald Trump’s administration has defied a 9-0 Supreme Court order in keeping him there. The White House has attempted to smear the man in absentia, with all the crudeness of those who used to accuse Black boys of taking liberties with white women.

This, apparently, is fine and dandy with Estes.

El #EmbajadorDuncan dio ayer la bienvenida a El Salvador a la delegación encabezada por el Congresista Jason Smith, quien visita el país para fortalecer los lazos bilaterales y dialogar sobre iniciativas que promueven el desarrollo económico y la cooperación mutua. pic.twitter.com/Zj0o8OSiOJ

— Embajada EEUU en ES (@USEmbassySV) April 16, 2025

On Tuesday, Republican Reps. Jason Smith of Missouri and Riley Moore of West Virginia posed proudly in pictures from CECOT — the notorious El Salvadoran mega-prison where the United States has shipped hundreds without hearings. Estes did not post such pictures. However, the 4th District congressman stood in a lineup with Smith and Moore in an image posted Wednesday by the embassy, along with Reps. Kevin Hern of Oklahoma, Mike Kennedy of Utah, Carol Miller of West Virginia and Claudia Tenney of New York.

Credit must go at this point to independent journalist and Kansas Reflector friend Marisa Kabas, who first reported about the Republicans’ visit. She reached out to the lawmakers for comment, hearing back only from Hearn’s office: “We cannot confirm or comment on the Congressman’s location for security purposes.” Tenney subsequently tweeted that she had also toured CECOT.

I reached out via email to Estes spokesman Roman Rodriguez to ask whether the representative had gone to the prison or was concerned about Abrego Garcia’s welfare. He did not respond.

Prison pipeline

We cannot close our eyes to the brutal reality of CECOT or El Salvador’s government.

According to Ana Piquer, Americas director at Amnesty International: “El Salvador is implementing a systematic state policy of massive and arbitrary deprivation of liberty. After three years, more than 85,000 individuals remain behind bars without sufficient admissible evidence, the victims of a judicial system now transformed into a tool for collective punishment and widespread repression. Attempts to export this policy to the situation of Venezuelan migrants and refugees in the United States highlights the lack of protection and the risk that hundreds of thousands of people now face of having their human rights violated by not one, not two, but three different states.”

You can’t confuse this gulag with any kind of American facility. In our country, attorneys and law enforcement must still abide by the law. Not in El Salvador. Conditions there go beyond mere cruelty.

Officials have decided to create a concentration camp, one in which prisoners are denied basic rights and tortured.

In the words of Human Rights Watch: “People held in CECOT, as well as in other prisons in El Salvador, are denied communication with their relatives and lawyers, and only appear before courts in online hearings, often in groups of several hundred detainees at the same time. The Salvadoran government has described people held in CECOT as ‘terrorists,’ and has said that they ‘will never leave.’ Human Rights Watch is not aware of any detainees who have been released from that prison.”

Juanita Goebertus Estrada, director of the Americas Division of Human Rights Watch, said that while the mega-prison was built more recently than other facilities in the country, he understands that conditions are similar to other prisons in the country.

“This includes cases of torture, ill-treatment, incommunicado detention, severe violations of due process and inhumane conditions, such as lack of access to adequate healthcare and food,” he said.

Given such damning details, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised El Salvador eventually transferred Abrego Garcia to more humane quarters. The country didn’t want further international scrutiny.

No one should go to such a facility. Not even the most notorious criminals, of any country or any citizenship status. No one.

Trump temper tantrum

Regardless of pushback from courts at every level, President Donald Trump has persisted in his quest to send immigrants out of this country and to the most brutal and dehumanizing conditions.

No matter their ideology or party, our elected officials must step up and speak out against such authoritarian violence. Estes, during his visit to El Salvador, had every opportunity to do so. He could have joined Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen in meeting with Abrego Garcia and urging his immediate release from detention. He could have spoken up for the rule of law and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as codified by the United Nations.

Instead, he posed for the picture and made no public comment. He lent his silent assent to a governmental lynching.

Abrego Garcia may have been a gang member. He may have beaten his wife. He may have leaked the COVID-19 virus from a lab and caused Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis to bomb at the box office. Any or all of these stories may be true. But he has been convicted of none of them. If the Trump administration actually believes such accusations against Abrego Garcia, bring him back and criminally charge him.

Due process of law means due process for everyone, citizens and noncitizens alike. Respect for the rule of law means respecting all court decisions, even those with which you disagree. Without following these precepts, our democratic society crumbles. You support the ruthless mob, willing to hang a man on mere suspicion.

Estes might be OK with that. On his website, he touts support for a bill that would strip power from judges. The same figures tasked with defending the rights of everyone.

Perhaps he has decided to declare fealty to a king rather than support a mere president.

Update at 11:56 a.m.: Estes did tour the prison, according to a Substack post from historian Heather Cox Richardson and an photo shared on Smith’s Facebook account.

Clay Wirestone is Kansas Reflector opinion editor. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.