Former Engadget editor Joshua Topolsky and a bunch of his old staff have defected from Engadget owner AOL to a blogging company run by their former boss. But not before making clear how much AOL sucked.

"Beyond technology... there's another factor here that's driving my decision," Topolsky wrote on his personal blog. "It's that [my new employer] SB Nation believes in real, independent journalism and the potential for new media to serve as an answer and antidote to big publishing houses and SEO spam." We're pretty sure he just called AOL's journalism fake, fake, craven and spammy. And he's seen it firsthand. For nearly four years!

[Photo via Carlos Gomez/Flickr]