The Hard Times
satirical website
The Hard Times is a satirical website with a focus on punk (especially hardcore punk and first wave screamo), alt music, and millennial culture founded in 2014 by former SF Weekly music editor Matt Saincome, his brother Ed Saincome, and comedian Bill Conway. It has been compared to The Onion, ClickHole, and Reductress in style, and has received praise for its specificity and niche appeal.
The Hard Times also publishes Hard Drive, a satirical video game vertical, hosts stand-up comedy shows at music festivals, and produces podcasts. As of 2021, the Hard Times podcast network included:
The Hard Times Podcast, hosted by co-founders Bill Conway and Matt Saincome
The Hard Drive Podcast, hosted by Hard Drive co-creators Jeremy Kaplowitz and Mark Roebuck
Hard Money’s Million Dollar Podcast
The First Ever Podcast, hosted by Jeremy Bolm, vocalist of Touché Amoré
Fanboys
Up the Blunx
Coward Hour, hosted by comedians Brendan Krick and Nik Oldershaw
The Ace Watkins Presidential Hour
The Pitch Group, hosted by Eric Navaro
The Horror Times, hosted by Tiana Miller, Lauren Lavin and Dan Rice
Hipsterocracy, hosted by comedian Johnny Taylor, Jr.
Vert Button, hosted by Bill Conway, Andrew Cannon, and Tim Ward
Deep Dive in the Shallow End, hosted by Kris Casey and Jeremy Kaplowitz
Content published by The Hard Times is typically virally spread through engagement on social media such as Facebook. The site averages between 2 and 6 million views a month.
History
Founder Matt Saincome began pitching the idea for The Hard Times in 2012 as a junior studying journalism at San Francisco State. He formally founded The Hard Times with his brother Ed and comedian Bill Conway in December 2014, following a soft launch earlier in the year.
In September 2016, the site passed 3 million views, and entered into an advertising partnership with Vice Media.
In 2017, the site launched Hard Drive for video game related articles, and began developing video content.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “The Hard Times” is satirical website. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Hard, Times and satirical, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “satirical website” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q60744916. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2014, 2021, 2012 and 2016.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Hard Times” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.