Personal gripe: G+'s What's Hot and Recommended
One of the really cool things about Google+ is it's ability to link to external content. If you find an interesting article or webpage you can post it here in in the hope that friends and acquaintances (and maybe even the general public) might find useful or interesting (sorry to my family who gets a flood of programming guff).
It's think Google+ also makes it pretty to properly reference this content - in general it's about as easy as copying and pasting a URL.
What I don't like are the communities that take contents and play it off as their own. Usually they end up cutting/pasting a webpage's contents or uploading the content to their account. I admit Google+'s link sharing isn't always perfect, so I can sort of see why people might have to upload a picture directly - but if you do, please for sake of decency try and correctly cite and give credit to the actual content creator.
Too many times I've seen a diagram by someone like Brendan Greg or Michael Kerrisk uploaded onto someone's account with little or no credit.
A second issue is there's very little quality control on "What's Hot" - The most recent example I can think of is a bug in "Windows Security Essentials" that caused it to peg the CPU at 100% on Windows XP, leading to some people to conclude that it was a deliberate ploy by Microsoft to make it look like your PC had a virus to get you to upgrade. Not only is it factually incorrect, but the suggested "fix" of uninstalling the software is probably going to put users at the risk in the long run.
What can you do to help avoid this? Try and do a little bit of research (a quick 5 minute search on Google is usually good enough) before resharing posts that sound a little fishy - try and find a good reliable reference and cite it (or hey - even use the content for your post). A little bit of effort should raise the quality of discourse enormously.
This rant brought to you by Jason McDonald 's wonderful Design Patterns Quick Reference that was was incorrectly cited (no, linking to someone else's upload doesn't count!).
One of the really cool things about Google+ is it's ability to link to external content. If you find an interesting article or webpage you can post it here in in the hope that friends and acquaintances (and maybe even the general public) might find useful or interesting (sorry to my family who gets a flood of programming guff).
It's think Google+ also makes it pretty to properly reference this content - in general it's about as easy as copying and pasting a URL.
What I don't like are the communities that take contents and play it off as their own. Usually they end up cutting/pasting a webpage's contents or uploading the content to their account. I admit Google+'s link sharing isn't always perfect, so I can sort of see why people might have to upload a picture directly - but if you do, please for sake of decency try and correctly cite and give credit to the actual content creator.
Too many times I've seen a diagram by someone like Brendan Greg or Michael Kerrisk uploaded onto someone's account with little or no credit.
A second issue is there's very little quality control on "What's Hot" - The most recent example I can think of is a bug in "Windows Security Essentials" that caused it to peg the CPU at 100% on Windows XP, leading to some people to conclude that it was a deliberate ploy by Microsoft to make it look like your PC had a virus to get you to upgrade. Not only is it factually incorrect, but the suggested "fix" of uninstalling the software is probably going to put users at the risk in the long run.
What can you do to help avoid this? Try and do a little bit of research (a quick 5 minute search on Google is usually good enough) before resharing posts that sound a little fishy - try and find a good reliable reference and cite it (or hey - even use the content for your post). A little bit of effort should raise the quality of discourse enormously.
This rant brought to you by Jason McDonald 's wonderful Design Patterns Quick Reference that was was incorrectly cited (no, linking to someone else's upload doesn't count!).
McDonaldLand » Design Patterns Quick Reference
