Keyvan Nayyeri

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 path, Gavin released the source code of the site on Google Code and made it possible for everyone to contribute to it. Since then, there have been some main new features added to the site helping it in its good progress.

A few days ago Gavin submitted a new story on DotNetKicks asking the users to leave their opinions on having a list of proposed guideline and new features to improve the quality of DotNetKicks content. This, as all of us know, seems to be a reaction to the recent issues around the site. I promised to write a follow up for Gavin’s post, and leave my opinions and suggestions because I don’t like this site to stop its progress. I’ve been using and contributing to the site for the past 3-4 years, and it has been the primary resource to spread the word on the community.

When online communities start expanding, they face with one common problem and that is the increase of controversy opinions and people that may not have the proper behavior for an online activity. Based on the type of the community, its field, and the number of users, it may face with different aspects of this general issue, but it’s left to the community owners and leaders to be able to handle the situation, and apply necessary changes to keep the quality. Human relationships are difficult to control and the reason is obvious: people have different personalities and characteristics, and this is the source of difference and debate.

However, lately DotNetKicks has been suffering from such issues that have damaged its quality to some extent. The main source of these problems is the significant growth in the number of users on this community, and the fact that it’s expanded to some users who don’t care (or don’t want to care) about what they do.

I think that there are two general groups of problems on DotNetKicks. First, some users submit fake posts that are irrelevant, or are just a rewording of an original post without any additional detail to promote a site. Second, some users leave off comments on some submissions trying to blame the author on why he has not used another URL or why he has posted this story.

Before continuing my post, let me refer you back to one of my recent blog posts about exaggerators and the way that they are destroying the .NET community. I want to contrast that general problem with a real example that is happening on DotNetKicks because in my opinion these issues are raised by the guys who want to promote themselves without putting any effort into anything.

I was going to write a post about the way that Microsoft is killing the talent among those developers who use its products, and how it has allowed someone without enough experiences to become a software developer and assert his capabilities. However, I’m writing this post sooner but it could be a related post to complement this series.

Specializing on DotNetKicks, I can claim that the main problem with this site is the behavior of some users who want to promote themselves through this bookmarking site in a short time and with the least effort. Everyday we see a huge list of new submissions on the site that users add, and many of them are repeating an original story. These are all referring to secondary posts that don’t add anything to the original content and want to attract some traffic.

We also see that many users submit several stories everyday which is obviously abnormal for a technical bookmarking site. While many of the old and new users have a low ratio of submissions per week, there are some users who submit more than 5-6 stories everyday. Interestingly, many of these stories cannot get their way to the homepage, and they just break the focus on useful content. DotNetKicks has a system of upcoming stories where newer posts can kick out the older posts from visitor’s attention.

That’s enough about the problem because we all know about it, so it’s better to talk about the solutions that can help it. I try to leave some suggestions that I think that they can help this community to keep its quality.

First and foremost factor is, having a good guideline, privacy, or something like that which defines the rules that must be applied to everything on the site, and can be used as the source for decisions. Fortunately, this step is already taken by Gavin and everybody has tried to leave his comments to be added to the guideline.

The second parameter is, deciding whether it’s good to allow self-submissions (submitting a story to your own site or blog) or not. There have been many debates about this, and some people agree or disagree with it. Most of the bookmarking sites allow this behavior, so it would be better to let users do this, but in my opinion the first submission wouldn’t be counted as a positive point. I think that on such a site, users should suggest cool topics to the community and let others decide on its helpfulness; therefore, other users should promote a post on their own kicks.

Besides, the current threshold for a story to appear in the homepage (6 or 7 kicks) should be altered. The simplest modification would be increasing the threshold, but I’d prefer to have a more complex system that considers the power of the story kickers in its appearance in the homepage. This can prevent the creation of fake accounts by a single user to promote his or her story. I talk about this credit system in a moment.

The other change that seems to be a required change is, putting a maximum limitation for the number of submissions by a single user in a period of time, say per day or per week. This can enforce users to choose the best content and submit it rather than submitting anything that they see, and even they don’t read themselves.

Moreover, a modification in the current system of scores should be proposed because a linear scoring system that only allows positive votes wouldn’t be able to help the site in the longer run. This site is dealing with technical stuff, and when we’re talking about technical content, a judgment comes to play. Of course, best judgment can be accomplished by the capability to vote with negative points to help the competition. Furthermore, this can prevent some off comments on posts complaining about them because with such a negative vote system, users can vote a story down and have their influence on its appearance rather than debating on it.

The other change that can resolve these issues to a great extent is, applying a new vote system that relies on the past quality of kickers. Hamed had a Persian photo sharing site where users could vote to a post in a very similar way as DotNetKicks, and after a while, he faced with same problems. I wrote a formula for him, to consider the past history of a user. In other words, the number of successful and failed submissions by a user can be used to determine his quality when he submits a new story or votes for an existing story, and this factor can be used as a weight for a vote. This way, some of the current users will be out because it prevents them from submitting 10 stories in hope of seeing one in the homepage.

Finally, the most effective way to prevent such problems is, being clear and strict against those who disturb the community. We use police, court, and prison in a society to keep our community safe, and everybody tries to help these mechanisms. Likewise, users on a site should try to report offensive users to moderators, and they also should clearly caution a user about his behaviors, so he knows that he’s not such a genius person! I always try to report spammer followers on Twitter and this has let me to have an active list of followers who participate in my conversations. I never victimize the quality for quantity and I think that this should be a general rule in our world.

In the end, I would say that DotNetKicks has been a very helpful site for the .NET community and has helped many users stay up to date with the most recent news. It also has helped many bloggers and authors to get the audience that they deserve for their fresh content. However, as any other concept on the web, DotNetKicks has gotten a serious competitor that is DZone. Many of developers should know DZone from its past history on the Java and PHP communities, and they recently have put a great effort into the .NET community as well. Alvin has taken the role to lead the .NET zone on this bookmarking site and they’re doing a very good job. One of the main advantages of DZone is its strong management system and the team that works behind the site.

Unlike DotNetKicks, DZone benefits from a strong system where users cannot lower the quality, and if DotNetKicks can’t resolve these issues, then it’s a good chance for DZone to replace it quickly.

Speaking of DZone, I must thank Alvin for promoting me as a DZone MVB (Most Valuable Blogger) where I’m listed among many well-known developers on the Java, .NET, and PHP communities.