Now if you’ve been around in the tech scene for awhile you have no doubt heard about HardOCP, a place with slightly over 20 years of publication history matched with an even more active forum community. Personally, I have always appreciated their detailed technical reviews, being unbiased to certain brands and for some time was my only go-to source for PSU reviews.
“Effective April 1, 2019 I will be taking on the position of Director of Enthusiast Engagement for Intel’s Technology Leadership Marketing group. Intel wants to reconnect with the top of the high-performance consumer pyramid which contains hardware enthusiasts, overclockers, gamers, and content creators. This is the part of our community that has great influence through word of mouth and online engagement. I’ll be focusing on helping Intel get back in touch with this audience and re-establishing a voice and dialog on where the company is going with its future technologies. If you are reading this, you are very likely already part of this group.”
Kyle Bennett, Post Excerpt
In the lengthy post published by Founder Kyle Bennett, he has said to be taking up a position at Intel as “Director of Enthusiast Engagement”, likely some form of community manager/PR role targeted at, as the title suggests, Enthusiasts.
Here is to hoping that with Kyle at the helm, Intel would finally eliminate some bad practices that they could get away with for being the market leader for so long. Namely, but not limited to, finally soldering ALL their mainline CPUs and scrapping the need to change motherboards every 2 generations.
“So what happens to HardOCP? I have thought long and hard about this. I do not want to sell HardOCP or HardForum and see those properties turned into something that I would not be proud of. HardOCP will be “mothballed.” It will no longer publish news, editorial, or hardware review content. Of course, being the “Director of Enthusiast Engagement” and closing HardForum.com, one of the largest computer enthusiast forums on the Internet, does not seem to go hand-in-hand, but there are some conflict of interest issues that need to be tackled. HardForum.com will be sold to a company that I have done business with for years, one that I can trust to run it in the way you are familiar with. HardForum will be demonitised and all advertising and commission links removed. Simply put, HardForum will not make money in any way.”
Kyle Bennett, Post Excerpt
While he has stated that he closed the publication front of the site because of “conflict of interests” amongst other reasons, the forum would still continue to run (on donations). Its sad to see him go, but I guess people have to move to newer (and hopefully better things) things sometimes.
You can read the full post here
You can follow his twitter @KyleBennett or support their Patreon page here
Of course, there is an ongoing discussion thread in their own forums you can join here
Chia Wei Chang, Writer (Technology)
Chia is the horse-author from the far flung year of 2153. While not grazing on grass pastures or reviewing old time-y games and technology from the early 21st century pretending to not know what comes next (as to not disturb the space-time continuum), he can be seen exchanging vast quantities of Earth currency for parts needed to fix his damaged space ship.
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