Stop Complaining About Poor Content and Submit Your Own
By Daniel Miessler on October 7th, 2007: Tagged as Blogging | Social | Writing
You can barely go a day on Digg or Reddit without hearing the cry of poor and declining content quality. It usually comes in the form of, “This place used to not suck so much” or, “Is it just me or is the content here getting worse and worse every day?”. Perhaps it is, but I have a crazy idea:
Stop complaining and submit your own content. Write something. Create something. Comment on something. Tell us what you think. Contribute.
And don’t worry about the stigma of submitting your own content; the whole concept is crap. Nothing limits the quality of what we read more than the idea that it’s socially unacceptable to self-submit. It limits what we see to two groups:
- Money-seeking spam leeches
- An extremely small minority who can see through the stupidity of the self-submission stigma.
The first group isn’t going anywhere, so the only long-term solution is to increase the ranks of the second one.
Remember that writers submit their work to publishers; they don’t wait for it to be found. Artisans have shows and invite lots of people, and academics submit to their respective journals. In short, submitting original content for peer review is crucial in any community that values intellectual progress. And it’s the only way to keep the quality of a site at a consistently high level.
If we as readers want superior content then we need become part of the solution. That means two things:
- Appreciating quality writing even when it’s submitted by the author
- Creating and submitting our own material without fear
