codyg1985’s Think Tank

As the part-owner of the technology community Next L3vel from 2002 to 2004, I made a lot of decisions that affected a lot of people other than myself.  I enjoyed playing a small part in creating a small footprint–a paw-print–in the realm of technology during those years.  However, now that I have hindsight on it, I would have done a lot of things differently.

Firstly, the staff were wonderful at Next L3vel.  Everyone did what they could to make the site an attractive place for people to share their thoughts. I was always looking at other technology communities, particular those that were similar in size, and seeing their success.  I then came back to Next L3vel, and I did not notice that success.  For some reason it did not seem apparent to me. As a result, I was always an ass to the staff in the sense that I wanted people to go above and beyond their capabilities. Now that I am a more mature person (I was a teenager at the time) I realize how much of a mistake this attitude was.  I should have been more compassionate, and I should have been there for every staff member that I asked to be a part of the team.  Sure, some of the staff members were not doing their job, but I ended up making things worse by not encouraging them, but instead shoving orders and threats down their throats.  I cared more about whether people liked me than whether they liked the website and the community as a whole. I feel this was one of the biggest contributors to the large turnover rate of staff members at Next L3vel.

An old saying here in Alabama goes like this: if you don’t like the weather today, wait a day or so, and the weather will change.  Well, at Next L3vel, the design of the site would follow a similar rule.  Even though I helped to make some nice designs for the website, I seemed to never be satisfied.  Every few months or so, I would change the design.  I have countless numbers of skins backed up on CD’s and everywhere else.  There shouldn’t have been so many designs in the first place.  There were a few good skins, and I should have stuck to them for the long haul.

There were too many rules.  The nature of our website meant that we all had to stride a thin line.  We would not allow warez or the posting of links to leaked builds of Windows Vista/”Longhorn”, yet we always talked about it as if we were going to show it off on a silver platter.  Other small rules that were sometimes inforced and sometime weren’t made Next L3vel an awkward place to visit and participate within. I think instead of the constituion of rules that we had at Next L3vel, a few basic rules would have done just as well. Keep it civil and simple, stupid. Most importantly, free discussion of anything should have been allowed, regardless of the consequences.  The folks over at Digg learned this “rule” all to well a a few days ago.

I had a lot of fun helping to run Next L3vel. I have made some really good friends over those years, but unfortunately I also made a lot of enemies.  Some of that couldn’t have been helped for obvious reasons (those of you that were a part of the website through it all will know what I mean), but I feel that some of the drama that happened wouldn’t have been such a big deal if things were different as I discussed above.