Cautioning the .NET Community Against Exaggerators
Caring about the community, especially a growing .NET community that wants to compete with successful communities like Java, is very important for those who are a part of this ecosystem. As you have seen on my blog, I care about the community and what is going on there, so try to publish my opinions whenever required.
It has been a while (actually a couple of months) that I wanted to write about something but was not sure about its proper time. However, I think that it’s time to write about this potential danger for the future of the community, and express my opinions. You may agree or disagree with my opinions but it’s worth discussing to prevent future problems.
In essence, the problem that I’m going to talk about is the potential danger of exaggerators for the future of the .NET community, and the way that we have kept doors open for their exaggerations that can have a negative impact on the quality of the community and its future. Before moving on, let me state that at first glance I wasn’t sure about my feeling but when I read a post by Rob Bazinet that had pointed to the same problems, I could be convinced that something is wrong.
As long as the community is growing, we’re seeing more and more people appearing on it trying to contribute something to the community. This is of course something very positive but it can show its ugly face when we see that a reasonable number of these new people are not adding something new to the community, and just try to get something out of that!
I see that there are some new people appearing on the community who don’t bring anything new to it, and just try to use it in order to earn money and help their business. These guys exaggerate to introduce themselves as active community contributors and use this path to help their career and business.
In my opinion these guys have succeeded so far, and I evidently see that they could earn a good position without doing anything because community has responded them in the exact same way that they expected. However, I cannot count on the community for this happening because it’s not something that can be controlled by a large group of people worldwide who shouldn’t care about such stupid stuff at all.
The main tool that has helped these guys to succeed is social networking, and using social networking sites to introduce themselves. Let me give some examples to clarify this point.
DotNetKicks is the main social bookmarking site for .NET developers and thousands of .NET community leaders and members have subscribed to it, and refer to its content everyday. This site has had a good growth in the past 1-2 years, and we’ve seen many items on the site that were posted by original authors to promote their sites and blogs. The worse point is the number of fake items that appear there. Such items has been growing fast in the past few months and we even have seen some discussions that yield to their elimination on the site.
Twitter is another social networking site where many of the community members publish their daily status and interesting finds, and a wide audience try to follow these members to stay up to date with news. Such social bookmarking systems have a nature in which friends of friends (FoF) can become friends at some point, and we usually see their names frequently. Lately I saw some exaggerators who try to use this fact to connect themselves to more well-known community members and use this path to introduce themselves as a part of the core .NET community. They imitate many things and try to appear as a professional community contributor. By nature, it’s good to have new friends and communicate with others but it’s interesting to see how someone follows 200 people at day and suddenly unfollows 150 contacts at night!
Moreover, blog is the older web concept that has played a key role on it. As time goes, more and more newbie authors and developers start a blog in which they copy/paste content from other blogs and sites to allure visitors. I also noticed a huge number of such blogs on the community who just steal the content to boost their position. More interestingly, I see how they use links to their business to help their career with the traffic that they have earned from stealing!
Alright, you may ask what’s wrong with this, and why should we care about such stupid stuff to waste our time? A few years ago I had the same idea but my experiences with the local .NET community proved that we should care about that seriously.
Obviously such ecosystems mandate a path to arrive at a position, and there shouldn’t be any way to cross this path because in that case community loses its real contributors and gets nothing in turn. When we allow such exaggerators to come up and earn a good position, those who have been contributing to the community should be disappointed and stop their activities. I can exemplify this with someone who may be known to many of you. Muhammad Mosa is one the guys who have had an active and continuous contribution to the community with great content (he’s along many other names that I can give) but I don’t think that he has earned the respect that he had deserved. On the other hand, I know someone else who has not done anything for the community but already has received more respect from the community members. Now the questions is, how we can keep the progress on the community when nothing is on its place?
Speaking of the local .NET community, I’ve had the same experience there where we were a small group of developers trying to do our best to extend the young .NET technology, and there were some guys who did same exaggerations and applies same techniques to deceive the audience. They tried to connect to this core group and introduce themselves as active members of that community. After a while I saw that all the community members are gone. When asked about the reason, they answered that why should we do something to boost others? And yes, they were absolutely right! Now we don’t have an active local community because no one can trust on others anymore!
I think that I said what I had to say, and I caution the .NET community against the danger of such exaggerators. I personally try to recognize everyone from his background rather than the noise around him, and I think that this is the best way to stop them. Moreover, I’m very sensitive about my profiles on social networking sites to obstruct abovementioned activities.
By the way, such problems are specific to Microsoft community because thank to this fat elephant, development has become something goofy, and everyone can start drag and dropping a few controls to build an application, and become a developer!
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8 Comments : 10.30.08
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@Dragan
Yes, that is the exact same point that I was talking about. We just need to stay against such exaggerators. I think that the only way to stop them is to take care about social networks and trying to recognize everyone from his background.
I agree with all this. I'm a beginner in .Net (only 2 years involved) and I always try to learn more and keep updated. It's sad to know that there are .Net blogs and sites that I cannot trust (thanks for the warning).
What I can do to fix this problem (my little grain of sand) is to pay more attention to what I read, so I can distinguish the real contributors and the stealers. This way, in long terms, the contributor will get the respect he deserve.
I was thinking a while ago about creating my own .Net blog where I can register my findings (which could be things that somebody else found first). But by reading this post, I realize I have to wait until I really have something good to contribute to the community. I don't want to be a mediocre blogger, neither a stealer. I want to be a contributor.
@Antonio
This wouldn't discourage you from having your own blog and writing on it. You always should feel free to write whatever you like, and it doesn't matter whether it's very high level or medicore :-)
@keyvan, it's Dragan, not Dragon :)
in the end, real quality always exposes over fakes :)
@Dragan
I'm so sorry, man. It seems that my typing has some kind of hidden auto-correct based on English dictionary :-P I just corrected it in my original comment as well.
It's OK. It happens often, usually with English :) (autocorrect seems to dislike my name)
DotNetKicks is a social bookmarking site that targets the .NET community and is mainly developed by Gavin Joyce . This community has been serving to the .NET developers for the past few years and has had such an excellent progress. At the middle of the
#1
Dragan Panjkov
10.30.2008 @ 11:57 AM
Hi, Keywan!
I assume this is the blog post you mentioned few days ago on twitter. I agree with your standpoint, and I probably cannot express it clearly because of my English is not so good. There is one thing you haven't really explained here, and that is: How to fight against that?
Real power of the community is when all their members contribute to it... of course, they all cannot do it in same way or in same quantity, but I think we'll all know more when we exchange our experiences. I don't consider myself as excellent nor experienced developer,(I'd probably say I'm in average middle), but I try in every way to help others to learn and to promote .NET as best as I can, realizing that if we all know more-it's better to us all.
That's for now...