Hey, first things first, this is my personal review of both the communities, as a website and as a help-go-to! I was not motivated or asked to write this by C# Corner, nor was I annoyed at Stack Overflow, which led me to write this. I am writing this, because I have to.
I do not want to criticize Stack Overflow, nor do I want to praise C# Corner community, but I just want to share what I feel like and what's real, on both the communities.
Formal introduction of both
Well, most of you are already aware of C# Corner, and Stack Overflow as a community and as a place to share your experiences. Most of you are guests here, and most you are guests over there at Stack Overflow — I personally am a guest at Stack Overflow, because I am much more active here at C# Corner as compared to Stack Overflow. I have spent a lot of months at Stack Overflow before coming toward C# Corner, or any other community. Stack Overflow was one of the first communities, which I had joined back in 2012, and all the way to 2014-2015. Stack Overflow people were highly technical, and they were not any less than bots — Stack Overflow is a good place, for those who know that a question has been answered, if you don't and you answer it... Then it gets "Cloudy with a chance of downvotes!".
But, not so much later I joined CodeProject because I liked their motives more, as compared to Stack Overflow, and not so long after I came to know about C# Corner from Google. I really liked the community, the first impression of the community was,
These people are awesome!
As most of you who have been at C# Corner for more than 1-2 years know, the reputation system was tough. I always kept thinking, okay, how can I tackle my way up in the top few members. I am at 29th position, and working my way up.
'Nough said, now let me talk some facts here. My facts are divided in the following sections, to talk about them,
- Community itself
- Reputation system
- Ranking and preference
- Bypassing the system
- Award system
- Profile activities
- Representing the user as a whole
I will try to provide the facts, and not talk paper-thin excuses here. So, let me begin formarlly. :-)
C# Corner Community
The community is amazing. Period.
I have been on ASP.NET Forums, Stack Overflow, C# Corner, CodeProject, MSDN Forums and a lot of other places on the Internet but I have never seen any community, that's so polite, and helpful in every sense. Since the days that I joined the community, I have been writing articles, sharing answers and producing video tutorials, and the editors there are always working like the hamsters. Though they try to be on-time, we must understand the fact that a hamster needs some sleep as well.
You can easily get to the community, through their Twitter, Facebook or Google+ channels. This is one of the most important characteristics of the community, since the early days and the community quite often responds and listens to the feedback from these channels as well.
This can definitely,help the members in raising their voice. It also helps them attract more audience for your content, easily. As for the SO, the same is the case over there. They are also active on Twitter, and have groups and meta sites where you can collaborate. Sometimes, SO responds quite promptly to a problem that members are facing, however
C# Corner is still not accepting any new Ideas once ideas start to flood in -- guys? Sharing about the community is the caring of the community and ideas mean that people are enjoying the service, however seeing such lock down sometimes breaks the heart.
Lastly, SO is not a community, it is merely a QA site. And QA are archive-formatted in structure, which means, sites can only have 1 question and 1 answer. Everything that tries to repeat, gets punished. However, we do this on C# Corner as well, but in a polite manner. Sometimes members do abuse this system on C# Corner, but, they'll learn and I really think the community needs to provide some moderation powers to some members, to remove the spam/abusive posts.
Reputation system
The overall reputation system for the community is good. I remember the days, when the rep earning was a lot like bitcoin mining. The reputation system has improved highly, and lets the members achieve a notable amount of reputation for their activities.
Reviewing the rep system now makes it clear, that the community focuses on the contributions, more than the quantity of contributions. Also, removal of the editors and admins from the ranking system really helps in improving the ranking of the members. This leaves the members with an opportunity to come out on top, without having to compete with non-technical members -- such as editors or admins.
Not only this, with the community you also get other perks, such as the C# Corner MVP award etc.
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This grants you access to some insights that you can easily manage and share with your peers, for sure, I do that more often. You also get to brag about the status you have in the community, among some highly technical and enthusiastic geeks from around the globe. On the other hand, you have a lot of experts on Stack Overflow and -- hands down -- almost everyone on the Stack Overflow knows what they are saying. I have seen a lot of C# Corner experts (even MVPs) fighting and arguing over a topic, which demonstrates a total nonprofessional behavior sometimes. On SO, if you are right, you are right. Period.
There is no need to bypass the system, because in most cases it is not needed at all. C# Corner Community is a friendly community and they welcome almost everything you share. If something is not acceptible they will share the insights, and you can improve. Likewise, even if you did, you will start to fall soon enough. One thing that I have noticed here is that these people enjoy featured articles, or the new technology that is coming out. So,
- Write about the new technology that is coming out.
- Share your views on things that are difficult -- why they are difficult?
- Provide solutions to long procedures -- write a library perhaps?
There are lot of ways of communicating with the community and gaining reputation and respect. Coming to the SO, the system is strict, very strict and there is no way you can outrun the hamsters. I like their feature because cheating is not possible, but I also do not like their structure, because that structure forces someone to cheat.
User Profile showcase
Last, but not least, one of the most beautiful features of the C# Corner community is the profile showcase. You cannot show your contributions based on the interest level, at SO. On Stack Overflow, most of the times you get a reputation for the portions that are less covered and you end up being an expert in a field you never really cared about.
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Notice, that my reputations are more for the tags such as CSS, jQuery and then for Java (see the upvote-to-post ratio). This somehow relates my profile to be a Frontend Developer. Now look at the C# Corner profile,
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Notice that my profile talks about "Career Advice", what do you think this post is all about? Then, my intentions are mostly related to writing about .NET framework, and sometimes cloud. The profile on C# Corner keeps shifting areas from time to time and if I have been writing a lot about a topic, but longer want to, the profile does not show that.
On SO, on the other hand, there is no way you can outrun your past. So, SO believes more in a Karma-like structure. This really helps you in showing off what your profile is really about, and what you like in your regular days, unlike specifying what you were liked about.
Finally, there are a lot of other areas that you should consider exploring, such as the ebook publishing, video tutorials sharing and much more. In the end, the benefit is for you, because you will get more audience for your content.
- Events and chapters
- Ebooks
- Video tutorials
- Career advices
- Question Answers
C# Corner community provides you a wide variety of ways in which you can expose yourself and gain more insights. Chances are, a bigger community or organization will somehow stumble upon your profile and you would get some more benefits. I received a Microsoft MVP award, after two C# Corner MVP awards, as Microsoft knew that I am a community leader here.
I recommend everyone who wants to be a Microsoft MVP, at least try becoming a C# Corner MVP and then move up from there. At the end of the day, the reason I am more active on C# Corner is because they are friendly, helping and always welcoming.
Happy sharing.