Community

I've talked with several people over the past few days that aren't terribly happy with the new Microsofties that are blogging here, primarily because they feel they can't be critical of Microsoft. Frans, for example, says he might blog elsewhere because of it. I'll throw in my two cents and say that in my experience, criticism towards Microsoft, and really anyone for that matter, is always welcome and appreciated, as long as it is measured and constructive. Don't just be like “This stuff just sucks, and you guys should kill yourselves right now for being this stupid.” That's rude and insulting, and doesn't do anyone any good. Chances are, if this is your MO, you'll just be ignored.

A better way to criticize would be to say. “This sucks. Here's why, and here's what I think you could do to fix it.” This way, you identify the problem, you identify the reasons the problem exists, and you identify a possible solution. This is much more useful to the person on the receiving end of your criticism. And if you're going to criticize, have the guts to put your name on it and stand behind your opinion. It's really easy to flame someone via e-mail or a nasty comment on a weblog. It's a hell of a lot more respectable if you don't let your emotions take over, wait 5 minutes, and then come up with a thoughtful, intelligent response that you can stand behind.

I'm not saying that I haven't fallen victim to this on several occasions, but especially since last week, I am learning. A great author once said “History is a nightmare from which I am desperately trying to awake.“, so don't judge me by my past, judge me by my present.

I'll be talking about this more in a blog entry entitled “Everyone's a Critic: The Art of Constructive Critisicm“ over on my corporate blog.

The bottom line is (this is directed at anyone thinking about leaving to be able to criticize freely) if you're going to be a constructive member of the community, then we invite you to stay here and continue to be one. If you're going to be a jerk, don't let the door hit ya where the good Lord split ya.

3 Comments

  • Andrew is onto something here with his point number 2. Not only the image of weblogs.asp.net is changing, but the culture will also change.

    But at the same time I'm typing that, I know very well that ScottW naver made a selection when he created new weblogs here. The culture settled up by itself from the different people here little by little.



    The big difference now is that there will be a new balance because the ratio of Microsoft employees gets much higher than before.

    There will still be a community, but a different one. Until now, it was more a community of people doing things with .NET and learning the technology. Now it will likely be a community of people expecting things from Microsoft and Microsoft expecting things from this community.

    Is that bad or good? Both probably, but what's for sure is that the community is changing.

  • Hey, we're pretty free ... NDA's not withstanding :-)



    I'm am *very* intrigued by the comment relating to community and cultural shift. I see no reason why it still can't be a group of people doing things with .NET and learning from the technology. The mere presence of an increase in Microsoft employed bloggers shouldn't kill that.



    This brings up an interesting twist, IMHO. Can one look at RSS feeds as one big, aggregated XML application, independant of the actual hosted location? On the surface, I suppose that answer is a resounding, "No." But what if everyone were to move to aggregators to read content? The community of a set of bloggers at a given hosted site would, I think, suffer as they identity would be lost to the aggregator.



    I'm going to watch this closely, becuse the last thing I want to see happen is community suffer.

  • Currently, a lot of people (difficult to put numbers on that) are still reading weblogs using their internet browser and not an aggregator.

    But even if everybody uses an aggregator, some RSS feed like the main feed here at weblogs.asp.net are grouping weblogs, and thus create communities.

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