If you join Radar and can’t find any other useful thing to do besides creating a thread 2 hours later, you’re probably up to no good, or atleast upto to no real usefulness. It’s not law, but hey…
The algorithmic feeds and co are all fancy stuffs. But they may need to get some basic fixes out of the curse of the ‘road map’ first.
See, it’s really quite simple, every post created under any category in Radar features on the homepage. A bit more heavy handedness in early user privileges could spare us the unfortunate decline in discourse quality evident 90% of the time when the homepage loads.
Truth to tell, I have more gripe to grind with Bankole than the OP, the latter just made himself the object of a much larger discontent.
if you guys re complaining about issues. visit other websites like nairaland, reddit etc and see how their organize there forumz. i believe this radar.techcabal is also a forum for tech guys and those interested in tech space. you organize it that way. icons for promotion,tech jobs,events etc and it wont affect the home page. so if you want to read about events. click on events and see the latest events people are posting not making some funny statements. that way is very organize as a forum not random.
i think you guys are in charge of this tech forum. if you dont things like events, promotions to enter a home page then you guys should organize it. if any body enters the forum if he wants to read things on latest events. click the event link and see people post on events going on. That will become more mature than you making complains. simple. i believe you are a tech guy. u guys can simply organize that within days simple.
@M.O.O you see what I mean, if this kind of replies were the prevaling quality of posts on Radar when you first joined, I wager it would be very difficult to remain entertained.
See I have no dog in this fight. Bankole prolly has better things to attend to. Note to self - find some for yourself too.
@jerey, the main issue is that of creating an essentially duplicate thread.
If you search, you’ll find that this topic of yours - and its derivatives - is one of the most thrashed on this forum.
The right thing to do if you had some new insight or point of view is to append your thoughts to one of the already present threads.
I do not have anything against your right to create threads though; I’ll just implore you to use it responsibly.
Welcome to Radar.
In every problem there’s an opportunity. If I’m not mistaken Radar is implemented using Discourse, which has a GPL license last I checked. A plugin which notifies a poster of possibly duplicating an already existing thread while he/she is in the process of typing out a new thread could be a fun exercise for the plethora of Radar programmers who would like to get their feet wet in ML/AI…
Thank you for this. His reply to me was so arrogant. That may be what will make people leave this forum. Not content quality.
We are not kids here and our new member had the best intentions when he started the thread. We should not be made to feel that participating on Radar by starting threads is a privilege. If it is, please state it as a minor Commandment.
This is just people feeling too big to engage with people they think are minors. There is Nothing wrong with starting a new thread despite it being related to an old one.
The way Radar started, I feared this would happen. The owner of radar should have made it membership by invitation only.
If you don’t want to discuss, stay mute. Don’t correct someone when He kept all the rules. What have you as a person contributed to radar’s growth?
It’s interesting that you think investing in proven business models (i.e. agric or oil) is gambling.
But still, I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with copy-pasta [sic] business models: the world is really becoming a global village in the sense that we all want the same things, and we (worldwide) can see what is trending in a different place, whether it’s ecommerce, or taxi-reservation, or hotel reservation, and other services.
The fundamental difference with say the West, is that the infrastructure we have is relatively inadequate, so businesses that copy models from elsewhere need to do a lot more to overcome the difficulties of doing things.
Take hotels.ng for instance: that’s an excellent business model to copy, since it addresses a need that most of us really didn’t think we had, but we do: do you know how much hassle it is to find a good hotel in a new city after you land, with vacancies, at affordable prices? I’m glad they now exists, and I check their site first before travelling nowadays. To make it work, they had to build their own networks of trust and inventory from scratch.
The “netflix of Africa”, and the “amazon of Nigeria”, as well as the"paypal of Nigeria"* also copied existing business models, but theyhave also done tremendous groundwork, to pivot and adjust to the vagaries of what’s on the ground in Nigeria.
Where I think the real problem lies is in creating me-too businesses without any real value proposition; without really understanding the market or what it needs; all in the hope of striking it lucky.
*it’s left as an exercise to the reader to fill in the company names that match the description; these are solid businesses that (at the surface) seem to be mere copies of foreign business models.
What about someone who’s been lurking for a while, and has searched for a topic, but only decided to join when they had something to post? I’ve lurked on many a forum before making my first post (which is often soon after I register).
Perhaps there’s something irksome about this particular OP, but I think that jumping on him for posting 2 hours after joining is … somehow.
I agree with the “most tech business don’t actually solve Nigeria problems” (see an earlier reply). But don’t forget that inspite of all the success in Silicon valley, the vast majority of business and VCs don’t really add anything to the table.
90% (yes, right out of my ass) of businesses in the Bay are bullshit me-too: “oh, my model? it’s like tacebook meets twitter plush a dash of instagram”, or “we’re like amazon, only for socks”, or the latest “we want to reify your sleep patterns”, whatever the hell that means. Money is thrown at them, and the vast majority die before you even hear about them. This happens ALL.THE.TIME.
90% (another statistic, pulled this time out of thin air) of VCs are shit. They don’t have vision or faith; they wait until the real VCs have made their move, then they all come clamoring for a piece of the action once they’ve seen real traction.
90% (sense a pattern here?) of stock IPOs are about shit. Most die within 5 years. How many googles, facebooks or twitters are there? Only one in each category. The other me-toos perished. Go even further: how many microsofts are there now writing operating systems for consumers? Apart from Nextstep (er OSX), Solaris, and Android (er Linux, technically not commercial, etc) all others have perished since the 80s was filled with “I too can write an OS” startups.
Gross exaggerations, yes, but the overall curve of the data shows the trend: the same thing you’re lamenting in our tech space, happens in their tech space.
Or wait a minute! There is actually a term to describe @87_chuks comment, trolling!
@87_chuks points are not entirely misplaced, but you know what will also ruin a platform like this besides content quality? Trolling. His concerns are genuine, its just not his place to drop a “welcome note” to a new user.
In my opinion, content quality is not a user problem, its a platform problem and restricting a user’s ability to make a post certainly isn’t the way to go, that would be counter-intuitive.
I guess providing an option for reporting duplicate threads would give concerned cabals like @87_chuks some authority to moderate the platform.
This is actually my maiden post on Radar and its disturbing to imagine that my post would end up with such comments from “cabals”.
P. S And come to think of it, the fact that he joined 2 hours ago shows why he would start a duplicate thread… Because he is simply a new user.
It’s one thing to innovate and another to catch up with innovations.
It would be that these ‘copies’ are merely to catch up with the already established trends in the industry. You get to the front line, or lead the pack, by beating the rest to it. You tread where the leaders already did.
…or you might as well just start a new race, either way, make progress!
