About the hype and marketing

[cobito]

Note: If you are susceptible to being offended, do not continue reading.

One of the things I like about this little world (computers in general) are the novelties. In recent months I have managed to keep up more or less thanks to the front page, where I try to put one or two entries a day of things that I find interesting (there is always the possibility that anyone can send their entries to expand the range, but that is another topic). My source of information is essentially Reddit, where the different communities talk about their book.

At the same time that I have kept myself informed about current events, I have been completing our library of old magazines where I have been able to browse a world that no longer exists. In one of the introductory editorials (I do not remember if it was Byte or Compute!), they said that one of the strengths of the magazine was the advertising, because there manufacturers could publicize their latest developments. And the truth is that when I bought magazines, one of the things that interested me the most was precisely the advertising because, indeed, you could know all the novelties of the month at a glance.

The world has migrated from magazines to forums, from forums to blogs and from blogs to social networks.

One of the reasons why I like Reddit is for the comments. In fact, the first thing I do after reading the title is read the comments because many times they are more informative than the entry itself that is linked.

The first (and last) time I was a victim of the "hype" was with Half Life 2. In the past, there was a forum called Half-Rules dedicated exclusively to the Half Life world. As a big fan of Counter Strike, I closely followed all the news: HL patches, new versions of CS, mods and so on. I was very involved. Then the rumor began that HL2 was being made with a brand new graphics engine. From the rumor they moved on to leaked images. Each small piece of information gave a lot to talk about: the reflections and realism of the water, that was spectacular, it couldn't be a game, it had to be prerendered. And from the leaked images they moved on to leaked videos. You could see the physics of the game as if it were the real world with the Havok engine... Everything was wonderful. With each small piece, the enthusiasm was fueled giving rise to long debates in that forum.

From the small pieces of information they moved on to the continuous delays in the launch. There was always a good excuse: the best of all is that they had stolen the source code of the game. Each delay increased my desire to have it. I think that until that moment, I had never wanted something so much. On the same day it came out, I went to the Mail Center and bought it. I finished it in less than a week and that was it. Months waiting for something that lasted less than a week. I don't know if I was aware of it at that moment or not (perhaps I didn't want to be aware of it because of the arrogance of not recognizing that I had been a fool), but it was a great disappointment: exaggerated expectations for a simple computer game (which, by the way, is very good, but it is just that: a game).

Since then, I have not been so involved in anything similar.

From time to time certain things have caught my attention especially. I remember when the Core 2 Duo were announced, I wanted to change my PC and in the end I decided to wait a few months for it to hit the market just to have it. Or when the first Zen test benches began to be seen (I was tempted to get one). But they have been healthy things: novelties that bring something interesting and that you know what you are going to get. From the Core 2 Duo I got a faster and quieter PC than my old Athlon XP. And if I had upgraded to Zen, I know perfectly well what I would have gotten.

The hype thing is curious because you expect something grandiloquent although you really don't know exactly what it is. Moreover, when you are surrounded by people "from the guild", expectations are reinforced and in the end they become something almost pathological. When you later analyze the situation coldly, you realize how ridiculous it all is. For me, Zen was nothing more than a simple platform with which I could get a faster PC. For thousands of people it was the event of their lives in the same way that the launch of Half Life 2 would be the happiest day of my life.

As I said before, lately I inform myself (about the digital world) through Reddit, a social network in which the most interesting (at least for me) are the comments. In recent months I have seen some outlandish things: people whining because Nvidia can't keep up with the RTX 30. AMD fanboys laughing at Nvidia for a poor planning. The same AMD fanboys kicking and screaming because AMD can't keep up with the RX 6000. People publicly thanking retailers like Best Buy for having managed to buy an RTX 3060 Ti (and even receiving responses congratulating them on the achievement). People bragging about having found stock of such an Intel model that is not found anywhere. And the fanboys are a case study in psychological: people who defend a brand tooth and nail and are not even shareholders of the company! It's crazy although I suppose that the same instinct is exploited here as with religion, football or politics.

The point is that I understand them all perfectly. I have been there and I have fallen into the same trap. And I am sure that most of them, when they analyze the situation in the near future, will realize how ridiculous they have been in the same way that I was.

I know that some of those users are contracted people who are there to feed expectations. I can even see that certain manufacturers may have made a miscalculation and cannot supply all the demand. Personally, sometimes I feel a little embarrassed reading certain things: once again, the latest is the guy thanking Best Buy for being able to spend 500€ on a graphics card to play computer games.

The world is full of fools like me and companies take advantage of it. Valve has my money in its pocket and hardware manufacturers have taken the wallets of millions of fools around the world. There are even those who are grateful for having their hands in their pockets and their money taken away. I can't help but mention the guy thanking Best Buy again.

All this gives me a bit of a creeps when I visualize all those individuals overexcited in front of their keyboards. It also produces a disgust in me because I don't always know if what I read is marketing or reality. Probably most of the time it is a mix of both things (a few light the fuse in exchange for money and the majority follow the flock). In general, I try to avoid bringing up these topics on the front page and the problem is that in the end, I end up talking about Linux (which I know has limited interest in the hardware world). Sometimes I even avoid talking about specific brands because I don't know if I am really writing about some "revolutionary" technology or if I have simply become a cog in the wheel of these campaigns (and on top of that without being paid).

In general, I don't feel comfortable "informing" about most of the novelties that I read for this reason and probably the front page is much less interesting due to this. I am not going to say that the world of yesterday was better because the fact that the magazines, at the same time that they put advertising from Microsoft, were ranting about MSDOS 4.0. The current world seems better to me in many aspects, although before internalizing any information, one has to do a critical exercise that is sometimes exhausting (and even with that effort, they are able to bend my ear half the time). Let it be clear that I am talking exclusively about information related to the world of computing.

Anyway, today I read the guy thanking Best Buy, it gave me a sense of embarrassment and I had to get even by writing this.

[Sylver]

I understand you perfectly, mayor. In my case, it's happening with the well-known Cyberpunk 2077. I suppose that's where the reflection will come from. It's everywhere and everyone is dying for it. The question is that, in the end, it's nothing more than an entertainment tool that depends more on the hype that is forcibly injected into it than on its content or net reward afterwards. I suppose that today it will be prolonged indefinitely through updates and new expansion packs and what was once a game will be turned into a whole franchise.

It's impossible not to resort to that phrase that says: "all past time was better". But as you rightly say, in the end we all fall in one way or another, regardless of the era, but because that state of excitement is chemically addictive. In my view, life takes on meaning both through the human and the passions of the human, and it seems logical to me that many people live their passions so intensely, since they are probably sometimes their only reasons to feel happy in day-to-day life. That's why, although I've also wanted to hide when reading it, I'm able to understand the guy who thanks Best Buy. The debate opens regarding whether, probably, life should be distributed or organized in another way so that people all over the world had passions or dreams with greater existential weight than buying the latest 3060Ti unit from an online store for half a thousand euros (note).

For example, I haven't had that with hardware and video games for a long time. It was about to happen to me with GTA: San Andreas, precisely because the forum and the leaks were basically school and classmates... In the end, you were left out of the conversations if you didn't have a team up to the requirements, and consequently the game. Then I learned to toughen up and play the games at my own pace, over the years, when they were already more "accessible" and the latest in hardware devalued the previous one, making it equally more affordable. Then there's the small disease that many of us in this guild develop. And I refer to the digital Diogenes.
Many taking advantage of that hype that we talked about, see a change of platform as feasible, selling the one they have and buying a more recent one. I consider myself one of those trapped by the charm of hardware and by emotional bonds, so when lack of means requires it, I save and invest in a new platform, but I'm usually unable to get rid of the previous one (until it simply dies by reaching its elements to the limit of their useful life).

I believe I find myself quite-very safe from the hype and the current socio-publicity strategies, but as you were commenting, mayor, we are never 100% immunized against it, and sooner or later, for whatever specific circumstance, we end up succumbing even without realizing it.

My recommendation to those who want to vaccinate against it is to stay poor and busy as much as possible. It usually works pretty well

Greetings!

[Fassou]

They said the Eighties were an exaggerated hyperbole, and it's no coincidence that they came back into fashion coinciding with this social media craze, where everything ends up classified as one extreme or another, endlessly reinforced by palm-greasers on the payroll of likes.

As a quiet man (probably also poor and busy ), seeing a human being intoxicated by the hype, leads me to understand it by remembering how you all had a moment in your youth when you longed for something with all your might, which now seems absurd and ephemeral.

However, I am also concerned about these people who live from shock to shock like football fans or fanatics, willing to do anything and against everyone to defend their favorite team or player, regardless of reality. Simply because they have become their religion, and as devoted followers, they will give their life to go to that heaven.

In short, don't trust anyone who defines themselves by a simple hobby as if it were a way of life.

Salu2!