Shacknews has been around for 21 years and we have had so many amazing writers come through here. The site began as a website dedicated to Quake, and then pivoted to cover broader gaming news. It is time for the Shack to make another move into a new coverage space. We have assembled a team to help bring our readers the very best gaming and technology content possible. It has been my pleasure to work with the team in my CEO role for nearly 3 years, and today I am stepping into the position of Editor-in-Chief.
Many gaming news outlets have lost their identities. So many websites have pivoted to cover "gamer culture" ranging from movies, TV shows, comics, and music. The entertainment news complex is already overflowing with coverage, which is why Shacknews is not expending any of our energy to compete in that media sphere. Instead, we are moving into technology news and reviews. There are plenty of news sites for technology, but very few sites do a great job of covering both gaming and technology.
Gaming News on the Cutting Edge of Technology.
We plan to cover technology while staying true to our roots as a gaming news website with a tight knit community of predominantly PC gamers. I am excited by this new role as Editor-in-Chief of Shacknews and I strongly believe in our new direction. Shacknews will provide Gaming News on the Cutting Edge of Technology. Please take a look at the new Shacknews team (including our sister sites) :
Asif Khan - Editor-in-Chief
John Benyamine - Editor-at-Large
Bill Lavoy - Managing Editor
Greg Burke - Video Editor
John Keefer - News Editor
Charles Singletary - News Editor
David Craddock - Features Editor
Jason Venter - Contributing Editor
Ozzie Mejia - Contributing Editor
Adam Kraus - Contributing Editor
Chris Jarrard - Contributing Tech Editor
Michael Wang - Contributing Tech Editor
Jon Wong - Contributing Tech Editor
Brittany Vincent - Editor-in-Chief of Modojo
Steve Tyminski - Editor-in-Chief of Gamerhub.TV
Kevin Tucker - Contributing Editor - Modojo
Donovan Erskine - Intern
I want to thank all of the great editors that I have worked alongside for the past three years. Steve Watts and Steven Wong helped navigate the Shack through uncertain times and the late Andrew Yoon was a great help during the transition in ownership. This Editor-in-Chief title is not in name only and I will be doing my very best to continue to grow the Shacknews brand for decades to come.
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Shacknews
replyAsif Khan posted a new article, Letter From the Editor: A New Direction
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Only guy not editing things. I have to assume he is writing his ass off.
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Donovan = Dognose?
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Great news. Does this mean it is finally time for: http://www.shacknews.com/chatty?id=32515138#item_32515138
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Yes, hardware reviews will be a focus.
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That will definitely continue to be part of our coverage.
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I will take the car-related-tech-person-job, thank you.
I appreciate the opportunity, Asif, for my first review I'll need access to the newly announced Porsche GT2. I will check out what hertz the display runs at (hopefully 144 or whatever!), then possibly see how resistant the seats are to mountaun due, and jizzum. It would be a good review. -
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Should we live stream the Model 3 unveiling?
These are great questions.
We will try to stay within the realm of what we think Shackers want to read about and also what we can cover. Gaming peripherals, PC hardware components, Quads, Monitors, TVs, VR, AR, IOT, etc.
If Elon Musk eventually gives us a review Falcon 9 Rocket to test out, we will find a way to do it for Shacknews. For now, I think we will stay pretty close to PC and gaming tech. Consumer electronics.
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I'll echo the thought here. I used to read Cnet for a long while. But, the last couple of years it's really wondered off into many topics not related to tech. The straw was one of those top 10 ways to clean some kitchen thing (I forget what it was). Really? That belongs on Cnet? Oh, and the headlines got really click baity. Bleh. I haven't gone back in quite some time. I assume they tried that tactic due to declining readership. There are SOOOO many blogs to compete with.
I believe Shacknews can do better than what Cnet has become.
REAL reporting and follow-up are so lost in the me-too rookie blogsphere. I always hoped Shacknews would grow up into top-rate journalism. Hopefully that ends up being compatible with Chatty.
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Sounds good! I'm excited to see what's next. ;)
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Ok, here's my 2 cents on this. First off, sounds good to me, I like games, particularly on the PC, and I like technology that deals with playing games. What I find most annoying is tech reviews are rarely done with a gamer point of view. There are places that do, but usually what I want to know about a product is either totally omitted, or hidden in their super in-depth 20 page review that is 90% shit I don't care about.
Monitors are an excellent example. Monitor reviews are either "OH WOW IT HAS RED LEDS IN THE BASE AND SAYS GAMER - 5 STARS!" or they are the most incredibly in-depth long winded review about every tiny little detail and I really just want to know the basic stats +input lag numbers and maybe relevant explanations of their wacky game-focused modes like WTF is lightboost, and is it cooler than gsync, or can you even use them together.
Shacknews doing something that picks the relevant info out of the insane over detailed reviews and presents it in a less novel-length format geared more towards "is this actually good for gaming, and is it actually better than the current offerings" would be great. -
Fuck yeah. Let's do this, Shacknews. Whaddya need from the community?
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Mercury subs
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I'M ALREADY MERCURY'D UP, BABY!
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THE SUBSCRIPTION IS COMING FROM INSIDE THE SHACK
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Yup. I still visit the site, but when Scott left the content went with him. I really loved his graphing, and fps methods. I haven't found a good replacement yet. Never cared for Toms. HardOCP needs to give up the rebel act, and update the site. Anandtech is just an onslaught, but the graphs are too simple imo.
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Did you actually hire Crabs Jarrard?
I can't wait for all the different ways he can hide cocks in each review! -
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Yeah. =(
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me likey!
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Hire sTeve to do tv spots for the shack. He has a lot of experience, I hear.
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where else are we getting cutting edge fishing planet news
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The new direction makes sense.
Also welcome new people! -
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Ok but what about "stuff that sucks?"
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Please steer clear of click-bait titles for views ala CNET...
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10 Clickbait Headlines to Help You Lose That Gut
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One Clickbait Headline to Help You L͙o̘̠͓s͔̰̞̮e ̧̰͙̮ͅỲ̪̠ͅo̕u̧r̰̟͍͘ ̲S͇̰̰͟a̶̤̦̥n̸͓it͟y̱̘̠
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Fantastic news!
Resident Evil 7 spoiler in the title forgiven!
I'm very close to removing techradar/gamesradar from my RSS not only due to all the Movie or Show articles, but also because their titles routinely spoil what shouldn't be known with silly stuff...i.e.: "New set pictures show Hulk in Z Cavariccis, shorts gone!" -
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I will be doing my very best to continue to grow the Shacknews brand for decades to come.
Las cucarachas entran, pero no pueden salir. -
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Bless you, the man with the briefcase. You just can't stop doing it for Shacknews.
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Yes. 77.5%. Yes. Yes.
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This guy is excited.
http://chattypics.com/files/shackbrowseUpload_6zox8s9oh6.jpg -
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Stay tuned.
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I don't think the chatty is suited for it either ;)
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You spelled Shacknews wrong.
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you're making a terrible assumption that people will only use edit to correct typos
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No, I'm not. And it doesn't matter, because it shows the entire edit history, as I already said. I've participated on Facebook a lot, something I'm guessing you haven't done. Trust me, even in the most heated debates, people don't abuse the feature.
Given I've literally never seen it abused on Facebook once, where the arguments and people are generally retarded, I wouldn't expect it to happen here ever.-
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i participate on facebook quite a bit actually, im not sure why you would equate people on facebook to people on shack, that's apples and oranges. The attitudes aren't the same, the posting methods aren't the same and the general idea of the two sites aren't the same.
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it's a false equivalency dude, there are a million ways you can use that to troll and the shack is action packed with professional trolls
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There is a mediocre wiki that isn't updated and no one cares about.
https://www.shackwiki.com/wiki/Main_Page
Ironically enough you can actually edit it...
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I'm going to respond in two posts here because I disagree both with the idea that it solves the problem and that it's a good idea...
Even that would require a bit of energy, because it involves ripping out one thing and transitioning to another thing that you'd still have to maintain. It's still an engineering cost to take any action. Beyond that, it would offer a relatively low benefit to shacknews as a company (better experience for it's superusers who are already unlikely to churn)
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Secondarily, you keep using the word "modern comments system", but I've got to disagree with you here. I think that every commenting system, modern or not, has its tradeoffs for different use-case scenarios.
They chatty works really well for the specific one it solves. I don't know of any modern system that has the same interface of no titles, showing most of a post (especially if it's short), and hiding the rest until it is clicked. I *love* the chatty's interface. I *wish* twitter, reddit, disqus, digg, all used it's user experience. IMHO, it's way more navigable that most other experiences.
I'd be super sad to replace it with something that didn't have that functionality, and if the motivating reason why was because the current system didn't have post editing, that'd be even more disappointing, because I don't really care about post editing.
Hell Twitter, arguably one of the biggest modern comments system on the internet, doesn't have post editing, so I'm not sure why that should be a priority of a gaming forum.
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Fuck that, if they spend money on devs there are about a billion other features that would be a better use of time and money.
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Excellent. I knew I liked you!
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I will be honest and say the writing has not really drawn me to the FP. Looking forward to the new direction. Hopefully it's like the old Tested site I loved.
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The Shacknews brand feels like it could be pretty broad anyway, it's not like the site is called "gameznews"
Can I make a suggestion, for some high level direction though?
Pick a few areas where you know you can build really *engaging* content, and make sure the internet (not necessarily the chatty) community responds *really* well to those areas.
I don't have any metrics to back this up, but Reddit, Twitter, etc, has killed the high retention reader, IMHO. It feels like the best way to survive is not breadth but *virality*. Virality isn't necessarily super deep content, either (e.g., the awesome doom post), but just highly sharable content and highly discoverable content.-
Remember that you should try to win in markets you can actually win, so focus on the areas you have the most energy behind. If you're reviewing a hard drive, you're solving a specific user problem "should I replace my hard drive with this hard drive?", which may be only slightly sharable or discoverable compared to http://www.storagereview.com/ or wirecutter.com having a round up and top 5 list of the best hard drives to buy.
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Also, I find this post by touch arcade super interesting for business direction setting: http://toucharcade.com/2015/06/22/toucharcade-needs-your-help-please-support-our-patreon/
Touch arcade is faltering because mobile-gaming advertising is diminishing.
IMHO their problem is they positioned themselves at the bluesnews of mobile gaming, which is boring. They should have positioned themselves as the wirecutter of mobile gaming: I still need a news site that maintains content like "top 5 games for a trip" "top 5 games you can play offline" "Top 5 multiplayer games", but they just review things in a vacuum and don't solve any real and repeated user problems.
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Shacknews beer coozies.
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