Hydrogenaudio is a strange place. I'm an engineer and software geek and appreciate their approach and philosophy. For analyzing the audible effects codecs their approach is the way to do things. However for hardware or anything that interfaces with hardware their approach becomes unwieldy and nearly impossible. Blind ABX testing of hardware if very difficult and is something that few people can do properly. So any talk of audio hardware or even interfacing with the hardware becomes verboten. How do you manage to discuss general audio without ever being able to mention hardware?
I'm not sure what the Hydrogenaudio mods will think.
I agree that they can be a bit heavy handed over there. I regularly lurk their forums, but never feel I'm qualified enough to comment on anything over there, so I never post.
On the other hand, I can
absolutely appreciate their desire to keep their forums "clean" of nonsense. It is their place, after all. HA essentially
stands for the idea of a scientific approach to high-end audio. And, to have that, you have to have standards (just like any respectable scientific journal should). And, there
certainly is a slippery-slope danger. We keep things pretty amazingly under control (and civil) here at Interact, but all you have to do is look around the web, or at a the occasional threads here, and you can see how these things can spiral quickly out of control. Without a voice of moderation, the conversation can't go forward in many cases.
And, I can appreciate how they have a clearly defined set of rules and, most of the time, they do their best to enforce them with some manner of fairness. Here at Interact, we have essentially no rules (other than "don't be a jerk") and we have the guiding hand of Jim. There are fewer hard and fast rules, but that also can be
much less repressive. The fact that there
aren't a bunch of TOS rules at Interact is probably why we are able to let
everyone have their say.
Valuable input sometimes comes from ideas you might find "far out" (or unscientific) at first glance. But, we
need Jim to keep it from slipping into a hellhole of flamebaiting and trolling.
Different approaches for different places (and different goals).
