They unfortunately publish a lot of useless filler nowadays, but it's pretty easy to skip past that, and they still seem to do real journalism on a regular basis. Are they really worth less than $0?
They do very little that want previously covered by other, better sources. As a bonus, I don’t have to sift through a mess for that information. Sadly, Ars has mostly become a sort of digest for tech/science. So for me, they’re not worth the time, never mind the money.