The current state of the NCF Clearline thread on SHF has turned into a house-cleaning excuse for Steve and his moderators. The last post that I read and replied to was one by Steve himself in which he publicly panicked pointedly about the litigious nature of “some of these companies” and then publicly requested his moderators to ”clean up the thread” and ban some of the participants.
So now I’m banned! It’s like a badge of honour. No reasonable argument, no reiteration of the results of my own listening tests methods (as usual, conducted either singe or double-blind with a couple of different music listening gangs), and no amount of respectful, patient technical reasoning was successful in that thread. Not by me; not by anyone. Not untypical. So bye-bye Agitater on SHF. Ciao. Aufwiedersehn. So long.
That level of scam product persistence by what in my opinion is a rotating group of SHF members leads me to conclude that they’re all either massively duped to the point of militant persistence in the promotion of obvious nonsense, or that some part of SHF has been co-opted by the audio industry in some equal part for use as a promotional vehicle for all manner of accessory nonsense products - cables, ‘filters’, ’audiophile’ network switches, etc., etc.
I mean, how else do I explain the fact that, in various threads on various audio scam products, the individuals touting roundly and singing the praises of the goofy products persisted in their own unsophisticated but enthusiastic voices in their OP and the first couple of days of their thread, but then changed voices (or a different member with a more sophisticated voice stepped in to pick up the defence) to that of a glib pitchman making use of all the tropes in semi-clever attempts to demonstrate skepticism of the skeptic. I think we’re being naive if that sort of rhetorical switch doesn’t tweak us to the presence of industry influence at the root of many such threads.
Guerrilla marketing has been a fact of life since the days of Usenet and the earliest major BBS‘s. Small back then, but present nonetheless. That guerrilla marketing began polluting the major social networks years ago, beginning with MySpace and jumping platforms as each new and larger one came online, is an unsurprising fact. Why should we be surprised (much less offended) that segments of the audio industry have recognized SHF (with its touted 110,000+ members) as a perfectly reasonable target for guerrilla marketing campaigns? Other major audio discussion forums have to affected too. Somebody tell me I’m dead wrong.