@First Strike is just a user. Some level of propriety is always welcome, but we shouldn't demand it.
Being a writer is a different story. I'm not expecting high ethics or journalism training - it's just a hobbyist website after all, with no "serious", professional media behind it. Still, I believe we should expect more.
"Just a user" or not, my statement still stands. The vast majority of us here at TPU are "just users".
Then there's the actual character of TPU. Few years ago it was a news site (and a rather good one). Is it still true today? Hasn't it moved into more opinion-based writing?
You know... there is a demand for such content as well. You are allowed to criticize things you don't like.
It's never been a "news site" to me. Granted we have plenty of that, but it's more than just news. We're a community of people with the same set of interests who come together to have relevant discussions, to really cram it in a nutshell. And, of course, you can criticize things you don't like, but there's a right way and a wrong way to do it,
you colossal dumbass. See how that just got nasty? No reason for that. Now, there's plenty of demand for content that isn't strictly news. Remember
@R-T-B's "confessions of a miner"? Some people liked it, a lot of people really blasted him for it (even though they were clearly marked editorial!). I think, in this sense, most people would probably like news posts better if they worked the way I described back in post 34. Or maybe not, but I offered my view, in a polite, constructive way, without bashing. I think that's the crux of the issue.
It's no secret some of TPU writers support a particular chip manufacturer and bash the competition. And I'm not talking about posting the legendary "Advertorial" but the articles we see every day.
When I look at these articles as news, they are often hard to swallow.
But if I treated them as opinion-forming, they would be perfectly acceptable. And I would totally understand: the particular company is clearly catering to PC-tinkerers after all.
I haven't really noticed this, except maybe one particular example (something to do with an interview, Intel's "old arch peppered with security issues" was mentioned). It was only a short while ago, but if I were to go back and re-examine the news post, and my own comments, I might feel differently today. Though you and I have had various Intel vs AMD discussions in the past, so I'm sure you know where I stand on that particular subject... but that's not really for this thread.
I do miss the old TPU in general...
The articles were better. There was way less financial (particularly: stock) babble, less one-sided press releases and less opinions in general. And the tests were better - focused on gaming and OC (strong topics for TPU staff) and less "productivity" nonsense, which just looks kind of forced and silly.
I still haven't figured this one out. I've publicly (and privately) mentioned that I have certain issues with overly political topics on the site (especially in the news section), which seems to be a rather recent thing. I don't know if politics and tech have just recently become intertwined (at least as much as it has been as of late), or if I'm just more aware of it now, or what... but something definitely feels different to me compared to "old TPU". Aside from that, I think the articles have pretty much stayed the same. There's always been tons of pretty well cut and dry news posts, like "company X announces product Y", "company X is developing something", "a thing happened at a place that produces X components" "dude sets 8.993 gigglehertz record using this hardware", etc. And there's always been "financial babble". Sometimes I try to read something like "Intel releases quarterly results", and my eyes glaze over and the gears in my head begin to experience extremely rapid oxidation while producing awful squeaking and grinding noises, complete with smoke billowing from my ears... but yeah, we've had plenty of those types of articles in the past.
As far as reviews go, they've all been pretty much the same to me, or even improving over the years. There are now more fields of data, or more accurate data, in video card reviews than there has been in earlier years. For example, once upon a time we never saw
card power consumption, we only got
whole system power consumption, which would give us an
idea of what power the card was drawing, but it wasn't as clear as the data we see today, which is exclusive to the card. Such reviews are very gaming focused as well. Sure you get stuff like 3DMARK results, but there's a whole slew of games that get tested, and OC does happen. It's just a lot... less exciting, I guess, with GPU Boost involved.
As for "productivity nonsense", I believe you and I have had that discussion before, as well. The way I see it, to put it bluntly, performance metrics easily get divided between applications that benefit from very high per core performance (yeah, on this site, that's usually gaming, though I do not deny the existence of "productive" programs that don't scale well with huge amounts of cores) and applications that easily scale well with today's processors with heaps of cores. This generally gets lumped into the "productivity" category, as most games still benefit the most from high per core performance as opposed to having loads of cores (though it appears some games are finally taking advantage of many cores), and gaming generally isn't seen as "productive".