What do you think of ShowMeDo

[Gasto]

Smart ass talking.

Why don't you do a thing then. Following an analogy of what you write.

Put youself in Kyran's and Ian's shoes.

*
You create a website to help people learn open source software and
open source programming. You start off with a few dozen of videos.

People start coming to the site. There are expenses to be dealt with
so a Club membership is created to deal with the expenses of site
maintenance and server bandwith, etc. You create a bunch of Python
videos, you suggest other authors to contribute, the site gets crowded
with good and free ('free' as in free to draw a gun and shoot at your
legs) and informative tutorial videos. That site gets praises by
appreciative people. The site gets a major update and server change.

Unappreciative people start writing stupid feedback in Usenet
comp.lang.python . You address the reasons why ShowMeDo has its faults
(like any other site), namely one man for the whole site. Idiots keep
complaining about the UI being 'unreachable' (while the more adequate
term would be 'improvable')
*

I guess that if you had created something, purely under philanthropic
purpose, you'd understand at first glance. But what could be expected
from a sewer rat that suggests to pay 10ths of thousands of dollars of
UI experts on a philanthropic site?

Go sell your *ss for that price, if you are so capitalism hungry. And
contemplate appreciative people get smarter from ShowMeDo while your
at it.

On Apr 29, 12:27 am, Steven D'Aprano
<ste... at REMOVE.THIS.cybersource.com.au> wrote:
> On Tue, 28 Apr 2009 21:56:08 -0700, kyran wrote:
> > I stumbled across this thread while typing a speculative 'showmedo' in
> > google, as you do while taking a break on a (very) late Tuesday evening.
> > To declare my interest, as things stand I amShowmedoCEO, CTO,
> > boywhomakesthetea etc.. I'm not going to plug anything specific and
> > normally let these things go but it's comp.lang.python and a
> > misconception is a misconception. Besides which, every now and then an
> > attitude really grates.
>
> Yeah, it really sucks when you spend time and effort to build something,
> and then discover that it isn't what people want.
>
> Or at least some people.
>
> [...]
>
> > As for the author immediately above, I think he fails his own test of
> > prudence. There are rather blindingly obvious download links below each
> > video.
>
> Perhaps you should forget your preconceptions and take a long, hard look
> at the site with the eyes of a first time visitor.
>
> As a first time visitor, this is what I see:
>
> * A bunch of "stuff" all over the front page. My eye is drawn to a bunch
> of thumbnails on the right hand side, which look somewhat vaguely what
> I'd see on YouTube. So I click on a thumbnail, expecting to see a video,
> but instead I get taken to a page with no video or download link. I think
> this is what you call a "series", but at first the page just looks broken
> to me -- where's the video?
>
> * Since I'm unusually interested in your site, and have nothing better to
> do, I click on the series heading, and go to another page. This one does
> have a download link, and a broken "click here to play" icon. Oh well,
> I'm used to video sites being broken on everything but IE, or requiring
> Javascript, or both. So I click on the download link, and learn that you
> require a login. Do I care enough about your content to create Yet
> Another Damn Login Identity? No.
>
> (And yet I care enough to spend 20 minutes explaining you how you could
> improve your site. Fancy that. That's because if you improve your site,
> it could be useful to me, but if I create a login account, I've got the
> burden of dealing with yet another login account.)
>
> * Since I'm feeling especially enthusiastic, I go back to the home page,
> and click a link under the "Popular Paths" heading in the "Blog roll".
> (You seem to be using the term blog roll to mean something completely
> different to the way it is used in virtually every blogging site I've
> ever seen.) This takes me to an even more complicated page showing a
> "Path", filled with things that look like clickable buttons but aren't,
> and thumbnails that at first glance look identical. If I spend a couple
> of minutes inspecting them closely and mousing over them, I see that the
> *left* hand side of the thumbnail is the author and the *right* hand side
> is something else.
>
> (No doubt some clever PHP programmer thought he was being clever to come
> up with that UI abomination.)
>
> * I see *one* thumbnail that has a "Click to play" icon next to it. None
> of the others appear to be videos. There is no download link. I give up,
> and decide that your website's UI is too large a barrier for me to bother
> with it any further.
>
> > All that being said, I do feel the need to make that point that we have
> > generated 350 odd completely free video-tutorials for the Python
> > community, including some truly inspirational demonstrations, if the
> > feedback is anything to go by. The site has been refined over time and
> > is at least striving constantly to improve. But some people will always
> > focus only on the negatives. They are few and far between but
> > occasionally, during those long, dark teatimes of the soul, it does make
> > one wonder why one bothers. You provide them with free videos, make no
> > claim upon them and all they do is moan that the format is wrong or
> > their time too precious to waste on a non-mandatory signing- up, though
> > not so precious they can't take time out of their day to whinge about it
> > in a group posting. I think it's the kind of attitude that kills the
> > spirit of FOSS stone-dead.
>
> You think that FOSS is under threat because people are willing to give
> you feedback that your use of non-FOSS software (Flash) is inconvenient
> to them? Oh dear.
>
> For every person who takes the time to write about it, probably one
> hundred people equally dislike your site but just walk away and never
> come back. You should be dancing for joy that Ben gave you valuable
> feedback about his user experience, instead of just walking away. Some
> companies pay tens of thousands of dollars to hire UI consultants to make
> sure their website is usable by first-time visitors, and that's excluding
> development costs. I've just given you twenty minutes of my time writing
> up my experiences for free. Is that enough in the spirit of FOSS for you?
>
> --
> Steven