Something on dismissive criticism

Some weeks ago, I wrote a blog post titled Full stack .NET Development Guide. At the time of writing this, the post had about 116 views and had some nice comments and helped some beginners. For me, the core reason I write these things is to save my keystrokes when I get asked questions about development, cloud, and a whole lot. This year especially, I have released more content than all past years added up.

On that last post, I woke up one morning and got a nasty comment on the LinkedIn share – it said and I para-quote “this is a not a full stack .NET development guide”. I normally would not have given this comment a thought if the writer of the comment had gone ahead to put some more into WHY it was not what I called it to be and probably given more content to guide readers to the right place.

For those of us who put out content, it is really hard work – no matter how simple it seems from the external perspective. Some of us do this just for the passion of it and expect no reward than see folks use the content we put out to become better. So just blatantly saying “this is not this” or “this is not that” or anything in that line is off-putting and annoying.

I have no personal feeling towards the person who posted that comment – I cannot even remember the person’s name. What I did on that beautiful morning was just delete the comment and move on to start my day.

The scenario I just painted above is what I call dismissive criticism. And it really does not help anyone. If you would criticize anything, it is best to make such constructive. For someone to wake up and decide to write a post, make a video, podcast or screencast is not a joke and just dismissing that is NOT the way go. It may not be the best content out there, but it means something to someone – especially those who it gave direction or clarity to.

If those ahead of us criticized us that way, many of us would not have grown to who/what we are today.

So, friends – if you want to criticize, please do it constructively.

Cheers!