[arkades]

All of my patients know my name. It’s on a badge, with a picture ID and all. This includes drug seekers, people looking for a suit, a handout, and just a general smattering of crazy folks. Yet they don’t manage to find my fb, my Twitter, my LinkedIn.

Part of this is that devs plug deeply into social media, personally and professionally, and have few (or no) firewalls between the two.

Unless you -have- to be the public face of a product, your professional media interactions shouldn’t be accessible to the masses. Your private definitely shouldn’t be. They need to be heavily firewalled. If I can trivially message the lead dev of my favorite game, he’s done something wrong. If I can reach him on a private account he can’t just burn or ignore, he’s done a lot wrong.

The internet hosts the majority of people on earth: it’s a very, very long tail of crazy, poorly socialized, immature, etc. There is no changing that if you are accessible to seven billion people, some tiny percent of that will amount to an overwhelming amount of shit.

The answer is jealously guarding your privacy and communications channels, which isn’t something I’ve seen in these discussions.

Im not trying to victim blame here. I just don’t see as fruitful lamenting something that boils down to “dealing with the public en masse sucks.” It does, and it will:

[Pfhreak]

Think about scale. A good indie game might have hundreds of thousands or millions of players. Is that the same order of magnitude of patients you see?

[arkades]

No, of course it isn’t.

But then, I’m pseudonymous or anonymous everywhere, and do my level best to keep my pseudonyms unrelated to one another across multiple platforms.

As opposed to letting my patients trivially connect my real name to my various social media channels.

[vvanders]

> No, of course it isn’t.

Then maybe it's time to put down the keyboard and listen to the experiences of the people who have found some level of success.

When you've shipped a title that's moderately successful you're more then welcome to come back here and tell us how were doing it all wrong. Until then I find it hard to listen to the advice of someone who can't empathize with what is happening here.

[burger_moon]

Comments like this are equivalent to saying you cannot criticize a football players performance because you've never won a championship. It's illogical on many levels.

[tehwebguy]

Do you need to constantly network so you can get a new job as a doctor if your next big release fails and your employer / project folds?

[arkades]

I mean, kind of?

Not to and with patients, but certainly to and with other docs and healthcare executives. The age of “I open a private practice and work there until I die” came to an end about a decade ago. Never mind requiring a constant stream of referrals. I have to network pretty constantly.