Anthus
11-28-2010, 12:31 AM
..the ZC community won't grow.
We get a lot of new members, excluding spam bots, who come here interested in ZC. Of course, these "n00bs" often make a bad first impression by making a topic posing a mundane question about stuff we "oldbies" know like the ABCs. They get short, snarky replies, or are warded off by a wall of technical jargon, that again, comes as second nature to us.
Oldbies will quickly throw out links to these mythical "tutorials" which should explain everything ever from the existence of God, to the new theory of relativity. Well, they don't. Come on. It's 2010. We grew up in the "read about shit" era. The younger internet generation is the "watch a video about doing shit" crowd.
What I think the community really needs to grow, the right way, is to focus on making the program accessible. Such attempts at some huge compendium of info have the right idea, but lack the support from those of us who can't be bothered to add something. Who wants to read? I love the idea of a huge library of referable resources. However, I think having effective, and accessible video tutorials is effective too, and may be the very leap in internet usability that could make or break future generations of ZC users.
I'm guilty of basically every point I've made, I'm just saying. What are your thoughts?
And let's not turn this into a "fuck the devs, fuck the police" thread.
We get a lot of new members, excluding spam bots, who come here interested in ZC. Of course, these "n00bs" often make a bad first impression by making a topic posing a mundane question about stuff we "oldbies" know like the ABCs. They get short, snarky replies, or are warded off by a wall of technical jargon, that again, comes as second nature to us.
Oldbies will quickly throw out links to these mythical "tutorials" which should explain everything ever from the existence of God, to the new theory of relativity. Well, they don't. Come on. It's 2010. We grew up in the "read about shit" era. The younger internet generation is the "watch a video about doing shit" crowd.
What I think the community really needs to grow, the right way, is to focus on making the program accessible. Such attempts at some huge compendium of info have the right idea, but lack the support from those of us who can't be bothered to add something. Who wants to read? I love the idea of a huge library of referable resources. However, I think having effective, and accessible video tutorials is effective too, and may be the very leap in internet usability that could make or break future generations of ZC users.
I'm guilty of basically every point I've made, I'm just saying. What are your thoughts?
And let's not turn this into a "fuck the devs, fuck the police" thread.