DJ Adams

Improving the SAP Community together, one comment at a time

A suggestion on how we can work together to make the SAP Community better.

As a Developer Advocate, I have the privilege of working with some amazing colleagues in that team, but also in the wider Developer and Community Relations organisation. For the size of the community, it's a small group, and the folks are working hard to keep the wheels on the bus and rolling in the right direction. But they can only do so much. In this post, I want to highlight a challenge for us all, and how we can, again, collectively, tackle it together.

The challenge

I'm talking about content quality, which to a greater or lesser degree has for a long time been a topic of debate both in the questions area and also the blog post area. My relationship with the SAP Community platform goes back to day 1, with SDN.

Actually, it goes back to well before that - creating and running the first online SAP community in 1995, and co-creating the SAP Developer Network has caused me to never stop caring for and worrying about those platforms, the people, and the content.

Blog post quality

The quality of some blog posts on the SAP Community platform could be better. I know it. You know it. We all know it. The number of people like you and me who worry about this sort of thing is far outweighed by the larger number of folks that make up the entire community.

Over time various folks have attempted to help educate folks so that they create better content. Here are some posts from me on this topic:

These attempts have worked, but only to a certain extent. Not only that, but we have AI content generation to contend with too. While used appropriately, and with thought, this approach can produce great results. But it can also produce poor content, especially when the human component in this equation is not entirely engaged with the purpose and process. Moreover, the ease with which poor content can be produced is astounding. And so the problem has got worse over time, and I can only see that progression accelerating.

The SAP Community belongs to us

Like you, seeing blog posts that don't belong makes me sad and frustrated. So, what should we do in this situation?

Report important issues to the moderators

Well, first, there's a decision to be made. Does the blog post break the important parts of the Rules Of Engagement? What are the important parts? Well, a bit of common sense will help. Does it defame, injure or harass? Is the content illegal? Report it to the moderators.

Feel empowered to call other issues out yourself

In other cases, don't report it. Use your voice publicly, by attaching a comment to the post, explaining briefly what you consider inappropriate, or just plain incorrect. Encourage your fellow SAP Community members to upvote your comment if they agree.

Use the power of the collective, the power of the shared heart, to highlight, educate, and yes, if you want to think of it in this way, to shame the author into adjusting or removing the post and changing their ways.

This is how society works. And the SAP Community platform is an online society. So feel empowered to treat it as one. Call the person out. Gently, politely, firmly, however you see fit. You be the judge - we're all adults here. Don't treat it as a kindergarten and go to the teacher whenever you dislike something.

Why? Because the teachers are in short supply. The moderators behind the scenes are working flat out on an ever increasing load of reports. Some that I would definitely class as important, but many, many others that I'd class as trivial and inappropriate.

Celebrate good posts

Calling out bad posts like this is important. Upvoting such call-out comments is also important.

But as well as calling out bad posts, remember to celebrate good ones by adding comments of praise or encouragement. Or just upvote them. That is the least you can do, it only takes a second.

The power of filtering and natural selection

Calling out poor content by leaving a comment helps educate, even gently admonish, if needed. But upvoting and adding multiple positive comments helps even more, not only to highlight good content, but also to feed the filter mechanisms that can surface content that you want to see, controlled in part by you.

Final thoughts

Thanks for reading this far. Here's a TL;DR (yes, I know it should go at the top, but think of it as the call to action instead).

Stop reporting poor quality content, and similar transgressions. Call the authors out yourself. Everyone is a member, and everyone is a moderator. And if we moderate ourselves with respect, honesty and firmness, we just might turn this giant sea-going cargo ship towards a better quality future for the community platform that belongs to all of us.