I'm late by a few months but I just wanted to pop in and rant here about why the PRSI forum has in my opinion ruined MacRumors.
Literally every single post is bashing others who disagree with you. There is no meaningful conversation whatsoever, it's just the same insult rehashed over and over, making fun of people who are on the opposite political side, and just pointless, endless cynicism. Over a year ago, I made a sarcastic thread with "Trump" in the title, where I was partially saying what I'm saying now, as well as complaining about the state of politics in general. Immediately people started unironically blaming me and humiliating me, clearly not having read anything other than the title. Not a single thread consists of logical arguments. I can't find one. Every time someone posts a thread with an attempt at having a real legitimate argument, people go off-topic or start throwing insults. Additionally you can't reply with a legitimate argument, because you're automatically made fun of, or best case scenario, completely ignored.
Now why am I saying that it has ruined the website if I can just not go to the forum? Well the first problem is that it always shows up on the side of the main page, even if you have it blacklisted. And I can't think of a single time where I went to the website and one of the recent posts WASN'T a reply to a PRSI thread. On top of that every time there's even the slightest mention of politics outside of this forum people bring an argument in there. News articles that even mention politics are automatically sent to the PRSI forum, where, you guessed it, people argue about the same crap they've argued before. Even worse, I recall that occasionally, a regular non-political news post that just happened to have something sensitive about it had people hijack it and have the thread sent to the PRSI forum. My biggest problem is simply the fact that it made people on this website in general more aggressive, more pretentious, more cynical, and what should have been a simple website to discuss Apple products, other technology, and so on now has become a place of permanent flaming and complaining (yes, I know). While it's true that the constant arguments about whether Apple has gotten worse or whether the iPhone X is too expensive are excessive and have gotten tiring, most of them are really only fueled by the negative atmosphere of this website, which as mentioned previously is a result of PRSI.
I'll be blunt - kill it. PRSI is a pest that's invading and destroying the rest of the website, making people upset and destroying the potentially friendly nature of the site (after all, aren't all users here Apple users to some extent or another?) due to the excessive political polarisation. After I realised how much this forum was affecting my mental health I stopped going to it and every time I do go here I often regret it. There is no point to it, other than maybe driving website traffic. But if that's the only reason, maybe that just says something about MacRumors, but I won't make any other assumptions.
