Completely demoralised by initial efforts
I recently made the very painful decision to move on from a project I'd sunk 2 years into (uptime monitor) to my real passion which is self-education and web development.
This is something which has been brewing for the last 2 years as it was either my uptime monitor or this other idea. It is essentially a platform for full-stack web developers. The core sections:
Community, forums, meetups, show-and-tells, feedback, etc
Academy, scenario and project-based learning (with focus on the fundamentals and not tech fads)
Jobs section to find employment, apprenticeships, remote jobs, maybe even freelance projects
This will be a monumental effort over the next 12-24 months and I'm doing everything I can gain to feedback. I decided I may stream the whole development on Twitch and have 4 followers over the last week and have streamed about 10 hours. But not sure people will get much value out of that as it's pretty boring to watch.
What has really demoralised me is I've posted some stuff in learnprogramming subreddit and keep being downvoted despite other posts which are essentially linking to landing pages asking for emails.
For example, one problem I noticed was people don't receive much feedback for their ideas (same problem I'm having!). All the auto-moderated posts asking for others to post their projects for feedback rarely have comments beyond those looking for feedback.
I created a post to say I'll give guaranteed feedback to any projects posted and am downvoted.
If anybody has ANY kind of feedback here on what I'm doing wrong I would greatly appreciate it. My approach is evidently not working.
You’re getting feedback from only one other person on that thread, so I wouldn’t take it too personally. Some of the points made on both sides are valid, but where things got messy was in how you responded to the feedback.
It’s very hard to convey the right tone through forum posts, so word choice and writing style can end up making a response sound aggressive or, honestly, a little bit like whining. I apologize if I’m coming off harsh, but I’m sharing my honest feedback.
In my opinion, I feel as if this is all about you and your idea, not what others are wanting, needing, or experiencing. If you wanted to provide feedback and start building a reputation, you could definitely do it as a comment on those other threads.
I’d challenge you to think about this: How can you be as radically helpful as possible for the lowest amount of overhead?
Appreciate the comment.
To be honest, that feedback only came through recently, well after I posted this earlier. And it has helped me better understand the way I was approaching it.
"In my opinion, I feel as if this is all about you and your idea, not what others are wanting,"
This is what I can't understand. I'm literally asking other people about their projects and assuring they'll receive thoughtful feedback. I'm not asking them for a thing in return. What I receive in return is a lot of engagement around feedback on projects, I can start conversations and can better understand what the real problems are.
"If you wanted to provide feedback and start building a reputation, you could definitely do it as a comment on those other threads."
It isn't to build a reputation. It's to build a better understanding of the kinds of problems I'm trying to solve with the software I'm building. I should be clear here, too, I am already providing feedback to many people across multiple subreddits.
"How can you be as radically helpful as possible for the lowest amount of overhead?"
By building software. But I have to start with the community or I'm developing in a vacuum just hoping people find it useful. I'm building out a whole educational and professional platform and there are a lot of ways in which I can help others along their learning journey and even in career development (I've been a contractor for the last 10 years so can definitely help people get started with freelancing -- being paid is great motivation for continuing to invest into the harsh learning curve).
I don't know. I must be coming off disingenuous or, as you touched on, selfish. You are right about tone over the internet. I do need to be far more wise about the words I use. I'm just a very straight kind of person and don't hold my tongue. I thought people would appreciate that level of honesty and forwardness considering it is so difficult to find it.
And thank you for your response here. I'm taking it all on.
I wouldn't take it too personally on Reddit. The community is very sensitive to any kind of perceived self-promotion. I have had success gaining mailing list subscribers via /r/learnprogramming, but only by doing it very indirectly.
My approach was to post a link to a resource I'd created (visualizations of recursive functions), and the post had zero mention of signups or anything like that. The page itself had a very unobtrusive signup link in the corner.
Thanks for some friendly words. It's rough. I'm a developer myself and been part of reddit for many years so I hold the same distrust and near-disgust for self-promotion.. but seem to go completely blind when it's me doing the promoting :D
My idea is to start building some small but [hopefully] useful tools and then sharing them with different communities and hoping people use what I build and subsequently sign up. I feel like it's crucial to have even a micro community of engaged people.. with that I can really start building some great stuff. But I need that ongoing conversation.
Next idea is to build a vocabulary builder for web development (think flashcards and multiple choice -- something similar to vocabulary.com). I'm starting with 80 terms which will take me about 20 hours to write simple definitions for, and probably 20+ to build something functional around it. I would then share that with others in hopes I can build a bit of exposure for what I'm doing.
Does that sound like a good idea to you? Feel free to be brutally honest. You'll be saving me time.
I like the idea, but honestly it's hard to predict what people are going to take note of. I built two tools and "released" them on /r/learnprogramming, and the first got 1.2k upvotes and lots of feedback. The second got 8 upvotes and 1 comment. I put roughly the same amount of effort into both.
I think, looking back, the first tool was appealing visually and worked well on mobile (about 70% of people visiting from Reddit were on mobile, so it's important that it works well there), so people got value out of it very quickly.
My own lesson learned from both experiences was that I shouldn't spend a ton of time on something before releasing it.
Noted on mobile! I am a firm believe in mobile-first design so I'd start there, anyway, and I have a premium theme integrated into my web app so design will hopefully not be an issue.
Awesome that you got some decent feedback from the first one! I'll probably limit this to 30 hours. Thanks again, you've helped restore some hope :)
Oh my, Reddit can be great and can be a shithole at the same time. Like any other popular community (except IH of course), there are hoards of users who only want to downvote or write some shit in the comments. It's fun, they have nothing to do at work, or they live their own miserable lives and want to feel better by downvoting everything and everywhere.
As was suggested by others, build your reputation in the comments, start by helping others. I am not part of /r/learnprogramming but the name suggests that it's for people new to programming. Streaming your process for 8 hours a day without explaining people the context is not the best way to learn, so I don't think a lot of people would be interested. If you were to condense those videos into bite-sized lessons explaining what you did, why, and how, that would qualify as learning and would be useful for newcomers.
Overall don't be demoralized by the negative feedback you receive on public forums. Instead filter it and analyze the constructive negative feedback. If you got downvoted to hell then try to deduce why it happened. Maybe the topic wasn't right, maybe it felt like self-promotion (even if in your opinion it wasn't), maybe the time of the day wasn't right, or your use of words. Analyze and improve.
Building communities is a lot bigger topic which is really hard too.
Appreciate the thoughtful response.
I think I'll throw away the idea of streaming it all, not much value and it also slows me down during development (need to be more conscious of what I stream, chews up resources on my laptop). I may start a video series, something like Building Stackweaver, and upload aspects of development to Youtube, use it as a weekly update perhaps.
I did take on the criticism over there and advice here and have clarified the post a bit more.
I have definitely set myself up for a huge undertaking in terms of building a community from nothing, but I will be working on this over the next 12 months before I throw in the towel, so really hoping something comes of it. All I can do is be hyper engaged with others and try to build cool stuff they/I would find genuinely useful.
Thanks for the encouraging words. Can be hard hitting brick walls with people when you're trying to do something constructive.