gridironcpj
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I've never seen the PC gaming hardware scene in such a toxic state. It's gotten to the point where people are sending death threats to reviewers and spamming various review outlets with nonsense. What/who is to blame? As the PC gaming scene continues to grow, those with less knowledge or education have a louder voice, as their share of the community continues to increase. I figured I'd start this thread so we could discuss the current state and list some of the bigger names in the Youtube scene who are contributing to the toxicity levels.
AdoredTV seems to be part of the problem. This individual blames the "stupidity" of the consumer for buying cards like the GTX 1060 over the RX 480, since an "enthusiast" should always go with the better price-to-performance ratio. This kind of rhetoric divides the community and puts the blame almost completely on Nvidia consumers. I considered AdoredTV to be essentially a conspiracy theorist in the PC gaming realm.
If this thread needs to be moved elsewhere, that's fine. I figured this would be a good place to discuss this, as the EVGA community tends to be significantly more mature than, say tomshardware.
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bcavnaugh
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Re: The Current Toxicity in the PC Gaming Hardware Community
2017/04/19 22:42:52
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I Want It Now Syndrome, I think is part of the problem in a lot of areas of new tech.
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MSim
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Re: The Current Toxicity in the PC Gaming Hardware Community
2017/04/20 00:10:51
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Are people finally seeing through the corruption in hardware reviews. Some hardware companies want to see the review before it's published. Some of them will blacklist you, if you dare speak bad about the product. They want you to focus on it's talking points only, if you go outside that, you risk not receiving a free product you can sell after doing the review.
Every hardware mfg has it go to cheerleader, that will give a bias review for them on youtube.
I like to look for reviews by people who purchased the product themselves.
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gridironcpj
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Re: The Current Toxicity in the PC Gaming Hardware Community
2017/04/20 00:46:12
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MSim
Are people finally seeing through the corruption in hardware reviews. Some hardware companies want to see the review before it's published. Some of them will blacklist you, if you dare speak bad about the product. They want you to focus on it's talking points only, if you go outside that, you risk not receiving a free product you can sell after doing the review.
Every hardware mfg has it go to cheerleader, that will give a bias review for them on youtube.
I like to look for reviews by people who purchased the product themselves.
It's not just corruption, but also a lack of robust testing. These reviewers only perform a single run of a gaming benchmark, which is an extremely flawed methodology. How do we know every run is EXACTLY the same? How do we know they aren't looking up at the skybox more for one particular product over another? AMD did this when they were showing off Ryzen before launch. Some reviewers were on a mission to make Ryzen shine against Intel. They probably think they're doing the industry a great service by making Ryzen look better for the sake of competition, but biasing the reviews towards metrics that 90 percent of consumers won't benefit from is simply a disservice to us all. I'm also surprised how uneducated these reviewers are. Nobody has ever considered taking the variance of the frametimes, which would put a meaningful number to those messy frametime graphs and allow for standardized comparisons. I guess most of these people studied the liberal arts and not any form of science or mathematics.
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somethingc00l
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Re: The Current Toxicity in the PC Gaming Hardware Community
2017/04/20 19:25:45
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I think marketing departments across the board have helped turn it all into an us vs them mentality that feeds the toxicity. AMD vs Intel, AMD vs Nvidia, Windows vs Linux, OpenGL vs DirectX, Xbox vs PS, IPS vs TN, vi vs emacs, etc etc etc. Every little facet of computing has come down to a holy war about who's side is better. We need more grey area, more understanding that people place wildly different value on different things. Not sure how it's going to happen though.
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quadlatte
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Re: The Current Toxicity in the PC Gaming Hardware Community
2017/04/21 20:53:54
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the all mighty dollar reigns supreme, as stated reviewers are skewed by the fact they get the product for free, so right there they are going to have a positive light on it. next is everybody is a "expert" on youtube, no matter how jacked their testing methodology is, what works in one configuration will not work the same in another, they fail to ( alot of them any way ) all the specs, not just hardware but software, as that can really make a difference. And its not just games or computer hardware, its everything, granted the computer industry does give more testing samples for free to keep than other things ( ill gladly take a new Aston Martin to review and keep afterwards  )
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Nereus
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Re: The Current Toxicity in the PC Gaming Hardware Community
2017/05/03 21:22:14
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LOL.. "an "enthusiast" should always go with the better price-to-performance ratio".
That's just straight up retard. Enthusiast by definition (in personal computer context) is about high-end performance ONLY, price is irrelevant.
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CptSpig
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Re: The Current Toxicity in the PC Gaming Hardware Community
2017/05/08 11:05:03
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Nereus
LOL.. "an "enthusiast" should always go with the better price-to-performance ratio".
That's just straight up retard. Enthusiast by definition (in personal computer context) is about high-end performance ONLY, price is irrelevant.
^^^ 
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candle_86
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Re: The Current Toxicity in the PC Gaming Hardware Community
2017/05/08 12:12:57
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Wait why go to youtube for a review. We have toms, tpu, anand, legit tech report, and guru3d to name a few
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Cool GTX
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Re: The Current Toxicity in the PC Gaming Hardware Community
2017/05/08 12:17:21
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Society seems to be full of people with a need to one-up everyone else; including their criticisms and feedback going over the top - more negative and aggressive. Is this just an attempt to get more attention ? The more outlandish the posts, the more followers you get and the more $$$ you earn ?
Respect, decorum and unbiased scientific facts seem harder to find.
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timmyboy04
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Re: The Current Toxicity in the PC Gaming Hardware Community
2017/05/08 15:43:06
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Cool GTX
Society seems to be full of people with a need to one-up everyone else; including their criticisms and feedback going over the top - more negative and aggressive. Is this just an attempt to get more attention ? The more outlandish the posts, the more followers you get and the more $$$ you earn ?
Respect, decorum and unbiased scientific facts seem harder to find.
Sad but true. Kind of like picking up a girl. "Nice guys finish last".
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joeymir
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Re: The Current Toxicity in the PC Gaming Hardware Community
2017/05/09 15:27:26
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Cool GTX
Society seems to be full of people with a need to one-up everyone else; including their criticisms and feedback going over the top - more negative and aggressive. Is this just an attempt to get more attention ? The more outlandish the posts, the more followers you get and the more $$$ you earn ?
Respect, decorum and unbiased scientific facts seem harder to find.
I had typed up a long comment but decided Cool GTX about summed it up lol. It's sadly the world we live in. Hec look at the election for gods sake!(not to get into politics) How does it come down to 2 of the most extreme people ever? Just like COOL GTX pointed out, negativity, aggression, attention seeking attitudes attract peoples attention, and sadly they may only have 1 or 2 good standards, so people focus on it and they gravitate toward them. Same goes toward reviews! There is a lot of biased, close-minded reviewers out there, but guess what, there is a million more biased "followers" to back them. Politics, Religion, Gaming, PC Hardware, all have one thing in common, extremely biased close-minded individuals trying to get others under their thumb and tell them what's "good" and what's "bad". In the end it's all about $$$$ and what people can do to make more money, no matter the cost. p.s. I feel like this topic could go so many directions lol! 
post edited by j2345912 - 2017/05/09 15:43:51
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Hoggle
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Re: The Current Toxicity in the PC Gaming Hardware Community
2017/05/09 23:12:48
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A lot of reviewers are given samples with strict understanding of what they want to have the reviewer focus on and what benchmark software needs to be ran. Normally these are standard tests or really to highlight what makes the product great. I have got graphics cards with 21 pages of information on it that they wanted me to read before reviewing, 18 pages on Xbox Live, 5 pages on a set of speakers. While part of it is to give a standard review so I could expect the review on one site to show numbers in line with another site it does lead to the fact that some things only need to be good at a limited number of tasks as you know what games are required to be tested by the reviewer.
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quadlatte
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Re: The Current Toxicity in the PC Gaming Hardware Community
2017/05/10 03:28:42
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kdurrell
A lot of reviewers are given samples with strict understanding of what they want to have the reviewer focus on and what benchmark software needs to be ran. Normally these are standard tests or really to highlight what makes the product great. I have got graphics cards with 21 pages of information on it that they wanted me to read before reviewing, 18 pages on Xbox Live, 5 pages on a set of speakers. While part of it is to give a standard review so I could expect the review on one site to show numbers in line with another site it does lead to the fact that some things only need to be good at a limited number of tasks as you know what games are required to be tested by the reviewer.
wow thats crazy. do you have show them the number first before posting results? i feel like the manufactures just try to use reviews as marketing material and want only the glowing reviews to ever be seen.
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quadlatte
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Re: The Current Toxicity in the PC Gaming Hardware Community
2017/05/10 03:30:59
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j2345912
Cool GTX
Society seems to be full of people with a need to one-up everyone else; including their criticisms and feedback going over the top - more negative and aggressive. Is this just an attempt to get more attention ? The more outlandish the posts, the more followers you get and the more $$$ you earn ?
Respect, decorum and unbiased scientific facts seem harder to find.
I had typed up a long comment but decided Cool GTX about summed it up lol. It's sadly the world we live in. Hec look at the election for gods sake!(not to get into politics) How does it come down to 2 of the most extreme people ever? Just like COOL GTX pointed out, negativity, aggression, attention seeking attitudes attract peoples attention, and sadly they may only have 1 or 2 good standards, so people focus on it and they gravitate toward them. Same goes toward reviews! There is a lot of biased, close-minded reviewers out there, but guess what, there is a million more biased "followers" to back them. Politics, Religion, Gaming, PC Hardware, all have one thing in common, extremely biased close-minded individuals trying to get others under their thumb and tell them what's "good" and what's "bad". In the end it's all about $$$$ and what people can do to make more money, no matter the cost.
p.s. I feel like this topic could go so many directions lol!
i think the biggest problem is people dont know how to respect other with a different point of view, its become such us vs them world with no one willing to compromise or try to under stand the other side of things.
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MSim
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Re: The Current Toxicity in the PC Gaming Hardware Community
2017/05/10 05:03:46
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quadlatte
kdurrell
A lot of reviewers are given samples with strict understanding of what they want to have the reviewer focus on and what benchmark software needs to be ran. Normally these are standard tests or really to highlight what makes the product great. I have got graphics cards with 21 pages of information on it that they wanted me to read before reviewing, 18 pages on Xbox Live, 5 pages on a set of speakers. While part of it is to give a standard review so I could expect the review on one site to show numbers in line with another site it does lead to the fact that some things only need to be good at a limited number of tasks as you know what games are required to be tested by the reviewer.
wow thats crazy. do you have show them the number first before posting results? i feel like the manufactures just try to use reviews as marketing material and want only the glowing reviews to ever be seen.
Some companies require you to sign NDA, they also want to sign off on the review before it's published. I have heard about companies that have a unspoken agreement that you must follow or else they will black list you. That way they can claim "we didn't force them to do anything". Youtube is flooded with undisclosed paid content. I wonder how many companies cherry pick the hardware they send out to professional reviewers. That's always in the back of my mind when checking out professional hardware reviews. How many companies issue 1099 forms, when they send over $500 in free product samples to a reviewer?
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candle_86
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Re: The Current Toxicity in the PC Gaming Hardware Community
2017/05/10 08:34:22
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Oh they black list, look at hardocp and toms for intel reviews right after the Pentium 3 1.13 problem came to light, they got black balled for about a year
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quadlatte
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Re: The Current Toxicity in the PC Gaming Hardware Community
2017/05/11 05:33:05
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i just want some honest real reviews, after installing my nice new samsung 960 evo it does not run at what they spec, even in the samsung app its slower. and it was a empty drive with the latest drivers installed. its still fast but just not what is advertised and what the reviews say.
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anarchy998
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Re: The Current Toxicity in the PC Gaming Hardware Community
2017/05/21 01:51:21
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As long as EVGA is a company I will always go for their gpu's since I have never had a problem with a single one.
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blacksapphire08
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Re: The Current Toxicity in the PC Gaming Hardware Community
2017/05/21 05:56:32
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It's probably always been like this. People have more outlets to express how they feel now so it's more visible. As long as there are multiple options for hardware people will always fight about it. Just ignore the idiots.
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MSim
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Re: The Current Toxicity in the PC Gaming Hardware Community
2017/05/21 10:36:56
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candle_86
Oh they black list, look at hardocp and toms for intel reviews right after the Pentium 3 1.13 problem came to light, they got black balled for about a year
I think EVGA still has [H]OCP blacked listed. [H] has tried mending that fence, but no luck (that i know of).
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Stardust_One
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Re: The Current Toxicity in the PC Gaming Hardware Community
2017/05/27 12:48:13
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There are good people at Tom's too, but the community is much bigger and so the level of maturity falls deeper. What I miss these days and my first rig was "brained" with the first Intel 386, okay enough of me... ^^ - is a (little) more about the scientific aspects of a hardware-product (in a review.) + Jayz and Co. is - and that's nothing about them in person - pretty superficial, they say a lot, but nothing specific, but maybe that's a talent too. ^^
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