A New Webmaster Community
Net Builders is a new webmaster community. In fact, it is very new — the domain was only registered on 7 December. And yet, during that time it has taken off like a rocket ship.
Many people in the webmaster community have lamented the lack of a good public forum to meet people, engage in conversation, and do business.
Most existing webmaster forums have unnecessary rules which restrict conversation. Many of them hoard Page Rank by using nofollow links or disallowing links entirely. One popular webmaster forum even has a rule against mentioning the names of any of your sites. How can a webmaster get help with his website if he can’t share the name of his web site — it’s ridiculously irrational and it violates the spirit of the web.
Webmasters tend to be entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs get extremely excited about their projects — which is one of the reasons they succeed. It is moronic to try to prevent entrepreneurs from talking about their projects and then still expect them to contribute to your forum.
Another common failing of the existing webmaster communities is that they see themselves as forums and not as communities. They fail to involve their community members in management decisions which affect them. Participatory democracy isn’t a new idea off the web, but it does appear to be a new idea on the web. The existing crop of webmaster forums are ruled like autocratic fiefdoms. That hasn’t works Cuba, Zimbabwe, or North Korea. How can anyone expect that it will work well on the World Wide Web, where community members can leave just by typing in another URL.
I encourage you to visit NetBuilders.org and judge for yourself.
