Chopping off their own feet....
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since i am involved or at least try to be involved on both sites I want offer up my opinion for what its worth. I joined the SW community when i started my current job, why because we used the software. As i become more involved in the community I started seeing more and more public power struggles.I myself posted in the rant thread a few times about the mods not doing their jobs and letting blatant things fly when those things were not allowed prior to a certain CM's departure. @Bill-Kindle sent me a link to this site after we had a public disagreement (but in the private conversation things were hashed out) I still post on both sites and attempt to help out where I can. ML seems to be more IT Pro based and not for the basic user (which is good). Now still haven't reached the SP level on SW yet and don't really care to, I'm not in it for the points, I'm there to provide help where possible just like here. While I post more there, i am starting to here since most of the people i talk to are now using this instead.
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@david.wiese the lack of a points system here changes behavior too. There is nothing to game. No SP group to aspire to or anything like that. The idea that everyone is a peer here is important. None of that hierarchy that goes on over there.
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@scottalanmiller I like that there are no points here. I always felt like people just wrote up how-to's just to get the points, and those how-to's did not have any value to them. They were just doing it to get points to get to the next level. I always approached the points as one that shows how knowledgeable someone was, boy was I wrong about that!
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I fought the points from day zero. They called me to discuss them before they went live. I tried to head them off but lost that fight. I feel that they undermined the community value over the long haul.
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I wonder if they were trying to compete with Experts Exchange ... give the users some way to see the value they've provided the community while still remaining free, unlike Experts Exchange.
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@Dashrender the points were about encouraging posting and they worked. They encourage volume rather than value and volume, not value, is what is sold to the advertisers.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender the points were about encouraging posting and they worked. They encourage volume rather than value and volume, not value, is what is sold to the advertisers.
Good morning everyone. wow i am happy to found this new thread again. same as @scottalanmiller expecting to read more topics every morning.
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It was a busy day today. Hopefully a busy night tonight too.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Hubtech said:
that's okay. seems to be the culture in forums. Get to the top (or close) of the mountain, get big britches, start upsetting the very folks that carried you to the top...branch off, small new forum with a high density of originals, tech talent, etc. Heck, this is going on in one of my automotive forums as we speak! it's funny the similarities, just the parts/pieces/lingo are different.
Agreed. Which begs the question, how do we guardrail ML from doing the same?
You can't. All forums are like Animal Farm in the end.....
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@david.wiese said:
I like that there are no points here. I always felt like people just wrote up how-to's just to get the points, and those how-to's did not have any value to them. They were just doing it to get points to get to the next level. I always approached the points as one that shows how knowledgeable someone was, boy was I wrong about that!
There's "reputation". As someone with an embarrassingly low posts to reputation ratio, I'm sensitive to this!
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I think SW is awesome. As someone running a one-man IT department, I can't tell you how great it is to connect with fellow pros in the same position, and I've had great replies to pretty much every thread I've started over there. The craic on here is ace and without wishing to sound too cheesy, it feels like you're all my friends already, even though I've never met any of you. As the forum gets more members, that will inevitably decline, sadly. I don't hang out on SW any more. I ask specific questions, or I add "spiceworks" to my Google search term to get specific answers to a problem I have (because I think SW has better answers than any other website out there).
The difference between ML and SW is that almost everyone here seems to work for an IT company (apart from me), so the conversations take a slightly different route. In my job, I'm not paid to be an IT expert, I'm paid to ask IT experts dumb questions and be able to understand their answers and make decisions based on them. So I value the expert advice I get on here, even though I suspect my lack of expertise annoys a few people (having said that, I think I generally hold my own around here). Having a few more newbies around here wouldn't go amiss.
I love debating, even about subjects I know little about. For example, I'll happily start an argument with @scottalanmiller about virtualisation, even though I'm not qualified to do so and it's a David versus Goliath battle. And debating really improves my understanding of an issue. I'm sure I annoy him at times, but I love that he's never patronising or condescending to anyone, no matter what dumb things they say. I often get accused of being a contrarian, and I guess there may be an element of truth in that, but playing devil's advocate is how you learn and I hope it keeps threads lively and interesting. As someone said to me recently, every discussion needs someone to ask the idiot questions.
tl;dr: Keep up the good work everyone! I love you all!
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@Carnival-Boy said:
I think SW is awesome. As someone running a one-man IT department, I can't tell you how great it is to connect with fellow pros in the same position, and I've had great replies to pretty much every thread I've started over there. The craic on here is ace and without wishing to sound too cheesy, it feels like you're all my friends already, even though I've never met any of you. As the forum gets more members, that will inevitably decline, sadly. I don't hang out on SW any more. I ask specific questions, or I add "spiceworks" to my Google search term to get specific answers to a problem I have (because I think SW has better answers than any other website out there).
The difference between ML and SW is that almost everyone here seems to work for an IT company (apart from me), so the conversations take a slightly different route. In my job, I'm not paid to be an IT expert, I'm paid to ask IT experts dumb questions and be able to understand their answers and make decisions based on them. So I value the expert advice I get on here, even though I suspect my lack of expertise annoys a few people (having said that, I think I generally hold my own around here). Having a few more newbies around here wouldn't go amiss.
I love debating, even about subjects I know little about. For example, I'll happily start an argument with @scottalanmiller about virtualisation, even though I'm not qualified to do so and it's a David versus Goliath battle. And debating really improves my understanding of an issue. I'm sure I annoy him at times, but I love that he's never patronising or condescending to anyone, no matter what dumb things they say. I often get accused of being a contrarian, and I guess there may be an element of truth in that, but playing devil's advocate is how you learn and I hope it keeps threads lively and interesting. As someone said to me recently, every discussion needs someone to ask the idiot questions.
tl;dr: Keep up the good work everyone! I love you all!
Dont worry, @scottalanmiller doesn't know much about virtualization anywho
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@Carnival-Boy said:
The difference between ML and SW is that almost everyone here seems to work for an IT company (apart from me), so the conversations take a slightly different route.
Of the people actively "answering" in SW, nearly all are with IT firms as well. But the number of people asking questions there is different and it tends to lean heavily towards people in IT departments asking and IT firms answering. This is kind of a natural thing because IT firms have a specific benefit to gaining reputation in this way and in learning by helping others (it's what they do) whereas IT departments don't gain from the reputation and don't, as a business model, help others. So the fit just happens.
That the ratio is different here comes from two factors. One, that it is the "core" group at SW that are most likely to come here because of the network effect causes that to mostly be IT firms and that it was specifically IT firms targeted by recent issues over "there" so they were the ones feeling threatened and most hurt and needing a place to go before the other shoe dropped.
I guess there is a third reason - the software that that other forum is based on isn't useful to IT firms, it was never meant to be. It is designed purely around the needs and workflows and lack of security needs of a small, internal IT department. But it can't be used by an MSP for many reasons - it just doesn't allow MSPs to work with clients effectively and the security makes it a show stopper anyway. So the culture over there is that IT departments broadly use the software and assume that the entire community does too and the MSPs all silently don't use it and don't say anything because the culture there is not to talk about it when you aren't using the product and loving it.
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I know currently, post huge investment, they have shifted focuses towards enterprise, or at least obtain a few enterprise customers. That's going to be a very hard shift to make in my opinion, not just that its WAY TO HUGE of a shift. A paradigm shift in the way your company functions doesn't sound like its a good idea.
I'm not a member of an IT firm btw
I just like helping and talking tech.As for people doing how-to's to gain points, I think that's the lowest common denominator of points farming, there are much huger farming tactics that don't go un-noticed, but on the same note can't be punished. And that would be writing reviews. I know when I was a moderator a guy came into my cross hairs who for almost 8 hours straight wrote reviews non-stop, it was popping up in every notification bar I had, it was driving me insane. And you have to think each of those 25 point reviews adds up pretty quickly when you add 200 or so a day. But eventually it was discovered that the vendor in question was doing it because his boss said he needed to reach a certain level by a certain period of time.... he eventually started copying and pasting his reviews.
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@RAM. said:
I know currently, post huge investment, they have shifted focuses towards enterprise, or at least obtain a few enterprise customers.
That won't work. The software doesn't scale and doesn't handle enterprise needs. It's really not meant for that architecturally. Everything is focused on super small, very casual IT needs.
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@RAM. said:
As for people doing how-to's to gain points, I think that's the lowest common denominator of points farming, there are much huger farming tactics that don't go un-noticed, but on the same note can't be punished. And that would be writing reviews. I know when I was a moderator a guy came into my cross hairs who for almost 8 hours straight wrote reviews non-stop, it was popping up in every notification bar I had, it was driving me insane. And you have to think each of those 25 point reviews adds up pretty quickly when you add 200 or so a day. But eventually it was discovered that the vendor in question was doing it because his boss said he needed to reach a certain level by a certain period of time.... he eventually started copying and pasting his reviews.
The problem is, if you look at how the points are structured, review farming is the intended goal of the points system. Users get upset because there is clearly no community value. But the points remain as they are because the company in question gains big advertiser dollars through review volume, fake, useful or otherwise. So the points encourage that. The mods feel like it is bad and officially nothing is said, but the points always will tell the true story and reviews are the biggest bang for the buck in points and that means that that is what the company wants done more than anything else. They see the most advertising revenue positively affected by that. So like it or not, it is a factor of the desired community behaviour there and a reason why there won't be a review system here - it's just there to generate "fake" traffic without giving any value to anyone because those reviews are worthless.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@RAM. said:
I know currently, post huge investment, they have shifted focuses towards enterprise, or at least obtain a few enterprise customers.
That won't work. The software doesn't scale and doesn't handle enterprise needs. It's really not meant for that architecturally. Everything is focused on super small, very casual IT needs.
Still from what I've heard isn't an idea they aren't considering diving into. I'm not an insider by any means, but I believe I heard it was part of the investment agreement.
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@RAM. said:
Still from what I've heard isn't an idea they aren't considering diving into. I'm not an insider by any means, but I believe I heard it was part of the investment agreement.
They don't have the engineering capacity and they will get exposed and burned if they start working with enterprises. Bad security and data farming that go unnoticed by the "cult" mentality in SMB will have them in court and in the press in the enterprise. It will only take one enterprise taking them to task to exposure the use of the software as embarrassing that people were not catching they egress of their company data and the selling of their data to external entities. Install that at a bank and your job is over if anyone finds out what is going on. Their business model, top to bottom, from practices to software, is only compatible with extremely small SMBs.
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There is a reason why no one crosses between SMB and enterprise - two different worlds. One is all practical and business, one is all emotional and politics. Products that do well in one really won't in the other.
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Likewise, they really rely on working in a Windows-centric world. In a network that isn't nearly all Windows the software isn't very useful. If you focus purely on desktops, it is, but doesn't scale. So it remains only for fairly small environments.
