Get In, Get Coffee, Get OUT!!!

There’s been too much activity lately in SCN, ironically it’s all happing in the coffee corner. Even though I am allergic to coffee, I like hanging around the coffee corner in SCN. But, lately a lot of things there are making some of us loose our sanity. As, Gareth rightly hollered “For the sake of my sanity…….”. There have been rants, grumbling, discontent… every word listed in the thesaurus to express this feeling, by some of the expert and senior members. SCN is not an exclusive club for the experts, it invites participation and the gates are open for all, but there still are some rules to play by. Open for all does not mean open for everything. I am neither an expert nor a senior member but I do feel that the system has become a victim of itself. ‘Gamification’ did bring in a lot of participation but at what cost?

Thomas, Jürgen, Tammy and the others we all look up to did not earn their diamonds and topaz’s by posting funny facts, jokes and their travel experiences in the coffee corner, and I don’t think they would care if they woke up tomorrow and found their diamond badge missing from their SCN profile. The place is called a coffee corner for a reason. You don’t spend too much time in a coffee shop unless you work there. I am not opposed to the idea of posting funny facts, jokes and our travel experiences, but what percentage of our participation we should ask ourselves. If more than 10% of our participation is in coffee corner then obviously Facebook is a better place for us than SCN. There’s a sucker born every minute and there’s one to like and rate our content 5 stars for everything we post, and that might win us a ‘most popular’, ‘excellent brewer’, ‘strong blend’ badges but that does not make us any better than we are now. And that definitely does not give us an excuse to linger around the corner.

And plagiarism. Plagiarism is stealing. The word may sound suave but it still means stealing. You are stealing some one’s possession and passing it of as your own. How would we feel if some stole your diamond badge one fine day? The hard earned diamond badge that you earned by posting all the jokes, facts etc. Don’t plagiarize just because it is wrong, don’t because people will somehow find out. There’s always a chance that people will look you up in the internet when you go for an interview and you don’t want them to see you as a plagiarizer (read ‘thief’).

My grandmother used to say, “There’s a place for everything and everything in its place” and SCN is a place for technical content. If we have an urge to share everything we see in our inbox then there’s lot of places in the internet. Remember, ‘diamonds are forever’ but the one’s earned in coffee corner don’t shine any brighter than others.