Kotaku / Gawker

[James]

http://n4g.com/user/blogpost/dedicatedtogamers/521785

Increasingly, Kotaku has championed an agenda in their articles. Whether it's hunting for racial slurs in an innocent animal-based flash game, or making sure animated breasts aren't too big, or calling out developers for making what can vaguely be called a "gay joke", Kotaku is here to save the day!

[...]

About 27 months ago, Kotaku's parent company, Gawker, decided to revamp all of their site designs, which resulted in a MASSIVE decrease in site visits (and naturally, a massive decrease in ad revenue).

[Psychotic]

Been going on for a lot longer. Years, actually.

Gawker is almost as well-known for it's random UI changes as Facebook is. There is also doesn't seem to be any justifiable reason for them, either (just like Facebook's!), other than as a means of quickly decreasing market revenue (short-term, usually evens out long-term) and just plain alienating and frustrating their users.

Kotaku on the other hand is the kind of website who on one hand touts their freedom of speech through being a "blog" whilst using the other to proclaim they are a trustworthy journalistic "news" website. It's either one or the other, you can't be both (not by my definition of "blog", at least).

Kotaku has also posted large amounts of rumour-based, tactless garbage over the years. Kotaku is, in my eyes, no better than your average gossip girl: It's authors post whatever they hell they want that is at least somewhat relevant to gaming, without actually checking to see if it's factual or not.

too long; didn't read: Kotaku (and Gawker in general) has been a shoddily run website/business for years now, and yet too many websites continue to use it as a viable "source" for news when, quite frankly, I don't think it is. Once upon a time perhaps, but certainly not now.

[synthetic]

I quite like the new Kotaku design and even added it into my RSS feeds, where as I rarely visited it when it had that previous look.


edit: brain packetloss fixed

[Tantalus]

Kotaku isn't an appropriate forum for these discussions. Some of the issues are important ones to address. But the cynic in me agrees that this isn't being done in a well thought-out and constructive way, it's all about sensationalist headlines to get ad clicks. It's great how they can shout about hot-button issues of gender in games in one breath, and then put out THIS in the next.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiuX6Pp_AwQ[/youtube]

[Psychotic]

Yay, double standards!