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General discussion

Cnet? Do you really care?

Sep 2, 2010 4:35PM PDT

I am self taught puter user. Learned a lot the hard way! One day came across C-net and found it to be the top of the top of internet sites!
I recommended and boasted about the site. Thought it had heart, a honest to goodness concern for the common user. But now as I have been learning more and more about the cyber world. I'm seeing C-net falling aside. Maybe because of the times, or maybe something else. C-net if your listening, I'd like to ask you to break this trend corporations are instilling and come back to us. You were the best of the best and now when I come to your site I feel in my gut C-net has lost it soul, heart and more. It hurts me that I can not trust your site any longer. I sorry, truly sorry

Discussion is locked

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That's how it goes
Sep 2, 2010 11:36PM PDT

That's how it goes generally. You start off not really knowing any better or even how to properly vet a site. As you learn, you start to see just how narrowly focused a site like Cnet is, and how little they actually care for the ideals they espouse. It's sort of like Fox New's whole "fair and balanced" thing. It's crap, everyone knows it's crap, they should be slapped around by the FTC for false advertising, but one party of the US political system loves nothing better than rushing to the aid of big corporations. Be it with sweetheart legislation, or just doing everything they can to obstruct investigations.

At the end of the day, Cnet is a business. They put out whatever content they feel will bring in the most people. They clearly seem to be targeting the Dilbert PHB crowd. People who you swear would buy anything if handed a brochure printed on glossy paper with lots of buzzwords (never mind if they make sense). As a BUSINESS, this is a perfectly legitimate way of going about things. As the self-styled technology journalism leader, it's akin to Fox News claiming they are "fair and balanced". And just to be fair, we could include MSNBC on the other side of the spectrum.

Anyway, it seems pretty clear which interest is winning at Cnet. Can't even rightly blame CBS, because Cnet was doing this years and years before CBS came in to keep Cnet from finally going down the drain financially. By all respects, CBS has left Cnet largely alone, probably because it doesn't really fit with any of their other businesses and they don't really know what to do with it. Sort of like tying two sinking ships together and hoping they'll float.

In any case, welcome to your new jaded reality. You'll be here a while. There's a reason they say ignorance is bliss.

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Maybe not...
Sep 3, 2010 5:19AM PDT

I have noticed a decline in user postings. It was GREAT when I first got Windows XP and I learned a lot here and helped out when ever I could. Now that I am on Windows 7 I tried to get a RSS feed to work so I could keep up with the Windows 7 postings.
I could not get it to work; outlook set up the folder just like it does on any RSS feed I subscribe to but no postings would come in.
I sent them an email for help, had to send that email again a week later because of no response. My second sending did get a response and it was along the lines of "oh it is probably an address issue on the link. Please keep in mind you can still continue to visit the forum for help..."
I replied to that email asking if the address issue would be fixed. No reply. I re-sent the email again a week later and received an email saying my email was undeliverable auto response.
I am guessing that the site is run by volunteers (no pay) and having a RSS feed isn't on their list of priorities.

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Cnet? Do you really care? (umm, not really- no)
Sep 10, 2010 12:21PM PDT

I stopped checking out cnet years ago but they seem to be absorbing more and more- with the same scriptlets and annoying onscreen messages that never respond to their, "Click here to remove this message".. The pages are very generic and they offer little in the way of 'open' objective reporting on platforms- this all starting with the conversion of download.com way back when.

Today we see others like Versiontracker.com succumbing to their cookie cutter ways. So I'll stop using Versiontracker and likely visit MacUpdate instead.