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All of the hardware is awesome?
Quizzical
Member LegendaryPosts: 25,483
Some years ago, I read something about how, no matter how awful a movie is, ads for it will have reviewers saying that it's awesome. The reason for that is that there are certain movie reviewers who will have glowing praise about absolutely any movie ever, and the people tasked with marketing bad movies know to get the movie in front of those particular reviewers. The general public might have no clue who the overly enthusiastic movie reviewers are, but those who market movies for a living sure do.
Your site basically does that with hardware reviews. Hardware companies send you the most random things to review, knowing that the reviewer will have high praise for it. That's why you've been getting so many products to review in recent months.
Is it better than alternative products? Could you get something just as good from a competitor for half the price? Who knows? The reviewer certainly doesn't. But still, the product is awesome and so you should all buy it. From the perspective of the hardware manufacturer, that's a pretty good advertisement for their product. If they're not paying you to run your reviews, you're doing it wrong. And given that you run a "sponsored" tag on some articles but not hardware reviews, you're probably not getting paid for the hardware ads you write.
Some of the reviews are seriously inept, too. In one that may never be topped, someone reviewing a memory kit had an outright majority of the benchmark tests in the review consist of synthetics that tested CPU cache and didn't touch DRAM.
Yes, doing a good review of hardware is hard. You have to be familiar with a product category, have used or tested a lot of competing products, understand what makes one product better or worse than a competing alternative, and be familiar with what the alternatives in that category are. Acquiring the expertise to do that well takes a lot of time, work, and probably money. So instead, you just write up and post bad hardware reviews.
Want proof that you're being too favorable in your reviews of hardware? Find a review on this site that basically said that the hardware is junk. I'm not saying that all hardware reviews should be unfavorable, but as with MMORPGs, some hardware is good and some just isn't. If you don't know enough to identify the junk, you can't write a good review.
In contrast, finding unfavorable reviews of MMORPGs on this site is pretty easy to do, as you've had knowledgeable reviews write critical reviews of a lot of them. That makes it more meaningful when someone writes a positive review. It also helps that you've got reviewers who are know a lot about MMORPGs and aren't writing a review of the first or second MMORPG that they've ever played.
Your site basically does that with hardware reviews. Hardware companies send you the most random things to review, knowing that the reviewer will have high praise for it. That's why you've been getting so many products to review in recent months.
Is it better than alternative products? Could you get something just as good from a competitor for half the price? Who knows? The reviewer certainly doesn't. But still, the product is awesome and so you should all buy it. From the perspective of the hardware manufacturer, that's a pretty good advertisement for their product. If they're not paying you to run your reviews, you're doing it wrong. And given that you run a "sponsored" tag on some articles but not hardware reviews, you're probably not getting paid for the hardware ads you write.
Some of the reviews are seriously inept, too. In one that may never be topped, someone reviewing a memory kit had an outright majority of the benchmark tests in the review consist of synthetics that tested CPU cache and didn't touch DRAM.
Yes, doing a good review of hardware is hard. You have to be familiar with a product category, have used or tested a lot of competing products, understand what makes one product better or worse than a competing alternative, and be familiar with what the alternatives in that category are. Acquiring the expertise to do that well takes a lot of time, work, and probably money. So instead, you just write up and post bad hardware reviews.
Want proof that you're being too favorable in your reviews of hardware? Find a review on this site that basically said that the hardware is junk. I'm not saying that all hardware reviews should be unfavorable, but as with MMORPGs, some hardware is good and some just isn't. If you don't know enough to identify the junk, you can't write a good review.
In contrast, finding unfavorable reviews of MMORPGs on this site is pretty easy to do, as you've had knowledgeable reviews write critical reviews of a lot of them. That makes it more meaningful when someone writes a positive review. It also helps that you've got reviewers who are know a lot about MMORPGs and aren't writing a review of the first or second MMORPG that they've ever played.
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Epic Music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAigCvelkhQ&list=PLo9FRw1AkDuQLEz7Gvvaz3ideB2NpFtT1
https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos?&sort=-downloads&page=1
Kyleran: "Now there's the real trick, learning to accept and enjoy a game for what it offers rather than pass on what might be a great playing experience because it lacks a few features you prefer."
John Henry Newman: "A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault."
FreddyNoNose: "A good game needs no defense; a bad game has no defense." "Easily digested content is just as easily forgotten."
LacedOpium: "So the question that begs to be asked is, if you are not interested in the game mechanics that define the MMORPG genre, then why are you playing an MMORPG?"