How social are social groups here at LQ?

druuna · 05-22-2011, 09:21 AM

Hi,

Quote:

Originally Posted by alan_ri

I was asked about the point of social groups here. Well, actually, there is no one point, it's that every member of a social group is a point and interaction between them makes social groups valuable, of course how valuable they will be depends on every single point.

I'll post the simplest example; recently I was looking all over the net for some good Debian wallpapers. Now do you think I should've started a new thread in Debian Forum here at LQ about that or if social groups here were more alive, I could've done that there and then exchange few links and/or whatnot. After all, as some have said, technical forums should be technical and I agree with that, to a certain degree, that is.

Your example is one reason why I am against personal blogs and social groups: It scatters (valuable) information.

People come to LQ to find information and a majority of the users are new to this site and will focus on the forums and not start looking at (specific) social groups and/or personal blogs. I also believe that LQ's search functionality only covers the forum and does not include social groups/blogs (is google allowed to index those???).

Keeping the information in the forums is the way to go, scattering it among the forums, blogs and social groups will only make it harder to find.

As always: My 2c.

BTW: Your first action should have been: Searching LQ and after finding 4 (useless) threads you should have started a new thread

H_TeXMeX_H · 05-22-2011, 09:46 AM

I think blogs and social groups here are mostly experimental add-ons. I don't think they are meant to be useful, more just for fun, and not much fun.

Larry Webb · 05-22-2011, 05:10 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by druuna

Hi,
Your example is one reason why I am against personal blogs and social groups: It scatters (valuable) information.

People come to LQ to find information and a majority of the users are new to this site and will focus on the forums and not start looking at (specific) social groups and/or personal blogs. I also believe that LQ's search functionality only covers the forum and does not include social groups/blogs (is google allowed to index those???).

Keeping the information in the forums is the way to go, scattering it among the forums, blogs and social groups will only make it harder to find.

This is the message I was trying to express in Post #27. The only help I could see in a group is getting one on one help. I know even in the Newbie forums it can be intimidating to an unknowledgeable person to ask for help when he has no idea how or where to start.

iphigenie · 05-24-2011, 02:17 AM

I had managed to come here on and off for a while and never notice that there were such things as social groups - perhaps that is part of the reason they are not very social, nobody notices them