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What happened to sharing work with other developers?


There was a time when you could create something interesting and post it to a forum with programmers and actually get people interested in what you have. These days it seems short of being blessed (exactly by whom, only god knows) on HackerNews there is little chance you can get anyone's attention.

It is difficult to say precisely what the issue is because it seems multifaceted. It appears a combination of the rise of GateKeepers, perhaps cynicism inspired by the rise of GateKeepers and just a general overload of information has coalesced into a very difficult situation for those of us still daring to create without a VC backed turbo to charge forward with.

Over the past 5-8 yrs I have become quite dishearten by this loss of a genuinely curios developer community, or maybe I am just an old (36) fart who's been left behind.

Even tenure in certain communities doesn't count for anything anymore. I have been a member of HackerNews for 8.5 yrs and have only had 3 or 4 of my postings ever make it to the front page. HackerNews claims to have an "algortihm" for their stuff, I call bullshit on that.


I yearn for the days when all one needed to do was something like this or this or this in order to build credibility...ok maybe I really am an old fart, have yet to make it to digg.

I believe it is not just a matter of a different time but rather a real change in the nature of collaboration/interaction channels. When I used to post to a site like CodeProject I didn't need to know people who could somehow make or break the discovery of my contribution, people simply discovered your work and voted it up or down based on whether it was good or not. Today you can setup a GitHub repo but unless you're part of some clique, serendipitous discovery is almost impossible. GitHub,HackNews, ProductHunt, TechCrunch..etc, these are all GateKeeper entities masquerading as open discovery platforms. All of these platforms function based on social graphs (implicit and explicit), unless you have the right cachet within some circles you're out of luck.

Even with the "open" platforms and products that appear to thrive organically, when you take a closer look you see that there are often puppeteers behind the scene pulling strings.

Anyway, this is a rant, more might come. I'll now post this to HackerNews and watch it get thoroughly ignored :)

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