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Comment by infodroid | Hacker News Reader

> A decent amount of Phoronix' content is basically blogspam.

This has not been true for a long time. Phoronix may have started as an amateur site with dubious content but it has now become a serious resource.

These days, it does a good job of (1) highlighting important developments around Linux and (2) providing context and fact-checking for new developments beyond what is provided in primary sources.

If you still hold a grudge against Phoronix for its reporting style from ten years ago, please reconsider.

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I didn't even know Phoronix 10 years ago, and not even 5 years ago, and I understand the critique voiced over it.

They often basically just repeat source information and add unwanted opinion, like an overengineered RSS feed merged with a blog. Also, often the link to the source is not given, or not the the link one would expect it to be, which then factually turns to some other Phoronix article.

I'm saying this while still looking at Phoronix regularly. I see the potential for a great news site in it, especially considering the benchmarking they do.

> often basically just repeat source information and add unwanted opinion

I don't think this is fair or accurate criticism. There aren't any Phoronix stories that just republish the whole of the source verbatim. And even when quoting the source material, the site adds a great deal of value by identifying the critical excerpt. And the real value isn't usually in the quote itself, but in highlighting the story as a notable development in the first place. Also, I doubt you will find anything resembling the opinionated style of The Register on there. Perhaps what you criticize as being "unwanted opinion" is just some background information or a summary of the source that did not reflect your opinion?

Yes, it was too strongly worded. I should have said "sometimes" instead of "often".

For example the first paragraph in [1] really doesn't go down well with me. It seems so negative, which I call unwanted opinion. Also the linking policy is not good. If I stumble an interesting development in Phoronix, I want next to take a look at the source myself.

I agree that Phoronix creates value, that's why I read it.

I don't even know The Register, but the comparison can't make a difference because I have an ideal in mind.

[1] http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=KDE-Babe-...

The linking policy is something I can overlook, because the linked Phoronix article is often a good summary of the original source, and it would actually be hard to find that linked Phoronix article unless the link was given to it, and the linked Phoronix article likely contains the link to the original source anyway.

As for unwanted opinions, you did not say what you found so negative in the first paragraph of the KDE Babe article, since it seems rather impartial to me.

I can only conclude that you felt the article wasn't enthusiastic enough for your taste. But if the real issue is this absence of positive bias then it would be inaccurate to call it a problem of "unwanted opinion". More importantly, such "cheerleader" style of writing, like you might find on community websites, is not good journalism and it is not clear why it is even desirable.

There are reasons why we maintain standards of objectivity in journalism. It gives people the freedom to make their own minds up about an issue and thereby to make decisions based on the best available information. This is not possible if all you read is that everything is great all the time.

Besides, having a widespread "cheerleader" culture is in the end harmful for any community, because it prevents discussing and fixing the things that are broken, which insiders are no longer able or willing to see.

I don't want enthusiasm either, I just don't want opinion. Given the facts, I can form my own, thank you. Journalists' job should be to provide all relevant facts and present it in a neutral way. The further any news goes from this, the lesser the quality in my eyes.

The rhetoric style and choice of facts given in the first paragraph don't seem impartial, they convey a negative view about the project. The comparison to the other media players was unnecessary, especially in this way. But despite our agreement or disagreement on this, it is not the first article that made me dislike some of the writing on Phoronix. And it seems I'm not the only one. In fact, in the past I stopped reading it because of it.

Yes, the linking on Phoronix can be worked around. The fact that it is the way it is, does not make it look good, though, at least to me.

It's still true. Look at this very post, for an example.

Phoronix is just Larabel banging out short blogspam around 3rd party sources and very dubious benchmarks. It's all sloppy and rushed.

If you want to follow important developments around Linux, I would highly recommend LWN.net over Phoronix. The writing is professional, for lack of a better word.

You're just repeating yourself without addressing the points I made. The value in a news site is in summarizing new developments, putting them in context, explaining their impact, performing fact checking.

Phoronix does all of this fairly well. Perhaps the style of writing or length of articles is not to your liking, and that's unfortunate, but that doesn't make the site blogspam.

This article doesn't prove anything at all. The Debian announcement was quite short, and there isn't much more that can be said about it, since most users have Secure Boot disabled anyway.

A significant point of difference with LWN.net is that Phoronix doesn't require a subscription in order to read the content, which makes it appropriate for sharing.

I don't agree with you on several points, but I don't think it would be a good use of either of our time to get into a silly point-by-point rebuttal. I don't think I'd convince you Phoronix is a bad blog dressed up as a news source for ad revenue. Instead, I'll just address the last wrong point:

> A significant point of difference with LWN.net is that Phoronix doesn't require a subscription in order to read the content, which makes it appropriate for sharing.

LWN doesn't require a subscription to read the vast majority of its content. Period.

The only thing you need a subscription for (which can be as low as $3.50/mo for students or anyone else who feels they are low income) is reading the current weekly edition.

In return, there are no ads and you get some high quality journalism. It's difficult for me to explain how much better the writing is than Larabel's.

LWN is a fine resource for original articles about Linux technology, and I am happy to recommend it on that basis.

But as a news provider, it is seriously lacking compared to the alternatives, which have at least half a dozen stories per day and cover a broad range of new developments. If you care to look, it should be obvious just how much LWN misses out.

> LWN doesn't require a subscription to read the vast majority of its content. Period.

This is misleading, though. Perhaps it is true if we count each post on LWN as a piece of content. But a lot of posts on LWN are just noise and not really what most people would consider to be content.

For example, there are daily "Security updates for today" posts consisting of just links, as well as frequent one-sentence announcements about new kernel prepatch releases and stable updates. One wonders whether they are automatically generated.

Such posts provide little value to a general reader compared to a dedicated mailing list digest. They don't even attempt to summarize what changed, or describe the context or impact of the changes.

If you exclude such items then a significant amount of LWN content will require a subscription, maybe more than half, especially stories that go beyond one sentence/paragraph in length.

All that content is made available to non-subscribers in the following week.

> Phoronix is just Larabel banging out short blogspam around 3rd party sources and very dubious benchmarks.

It's clear that you have an axe to grind with Phoronix and you are very vocal with your strong personal opinion, but your comments also don't strike me as reasonable.

For instance, Phoronix does distribute its phoronix test suite, and anyone (including you) is free to test and validate their claims. Yet, from all benchmark sites on earth, somehow you single out Phoronix as a site whose benchmarks somehow are "dubious".

Phoronix is also the first site that systematically tested hardware on linux and released benchmarks covering interesting linux-related issues, such as the performance gap in graphics cards resulting from the use of proprietary and FLOSS drivers.

Do you actually have any basis to substantiate your personal assertions, or are you just dedicated to slander Phoronix with baseless assertions?

First, just to get this out the way:

> are you just dedicated to slander Phoronix with baseless assertions?

If you think anything I've said is slander, you don't have the first clue what slander is.

> Yet, from all benchmark sites on earth, somehow you single out Phoronix as a site whose benchmarks somehow are "dubious".

There may be other bad benchmarking sites I'm not aware of, but they aren't the ones in the article? Not sure why you think this is "singling out."

Here's some excerpts from a discussion of the topic on reddit[0]. I tend to agree with their characterizations of Phoronix' flaws:

> Apart from sensationalist headlines where he (Michael Larabee) tries his hardest to manufacture controversy I also think the benchmarks are the worst aspect of Phoronix as they are typically so poor in their implementations as to be worthless and generally only serves to spread misinformation. > > The compiler benchmarks are a joke, only recently has he even started to display the actual compiler options used and not even for all tests, secondly he doesn't even understand how compiler options doesn't correlate and make totally pointless tests of -O2 versus -O2, -O1 vs -O1 etcetera > > ... > The we have the operating system / distro comparisons where he doesn't make a lick of effort to have them use similar settings, for example doing game benchmarks where one system also runs desktop 3d compositing and the other doesn't means that the end results are inconclusive enough to be worthless

> copy-paste articles, especially wine announcements or information from mailing lists, where author just copy-pastes what message said, without apparently having any understanding of his own on the topic. nothing really annoys me more than that - lazy journalism for the advertising dime. posts without links to original source, or with barely any links. but tons of links leading back to phoronix are sure to be always there. benchmarks where results visible on the graphs are summed up by some inconclusive filler banter that doesn't really say anything relatable to data represented on them (and sometimes is quite the opposite) . > > phoronix is basically total opposite of LWN. nearly zero effort/research goes into each article, beer promotion all the time and extreme amounts of self-referencing links. it's pretty much clickbait all the time, where a single quip from a mailing list can get into a full blown article.

[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1ittd8/why_all_of_th...

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