As a fresh user of dev.to for couple of days, I saw some posts about current status of dev.to or is it a victim of its own success? People complained about repetitive cheap curated content ranked at top all the time.
Actually dev.to works as intended, most user-generated content community has a perceived quality driven by hot trending topics.
Same things happens to Twitter and Reddit but they are too big and you just don't see it, they have enough content to build personalized feed. Eventually you'll get sick of people keep tweeting about HTML, CSS, JS but you have the option to follow other topics/people.
Same thing doesn't apply to dev.to because this is a niche community with less than 1M users. If you have worked in software development long enough you'll realize that there're not much new or deep things to write about when mostly already covered in official documents.
High quality articles are expensive to produce, rock-star developers write a handful of them in 10 years, professional bloggers or book writers might cross-post a piece of their work here.
Forget about beginner/intermediate developers writing high quality posts because they don't have enough insights and experiences to elaborate difficult concepts to recognized as quality content. The only good thing they can do are curating content and copy+modify what they know. If they don't do that then dev.to just dead already!
Css-tricks.com has around 10k reasonable good long-form articles and has traffic similar to dev.to. How can dev.to make a break though from here.
The big problem with dev.to is they want to build a highly-interactive with long-form content community. Why is that?
- Long form content are limited and hard to mass produce, even with a big userbase.
- Highly interactive site is also impossible when number of posts and users are limited.
- Showing sorted content is harmful, it creates illusion of the whole site quality, visitors feel like that the only good thing they can find at dev.to. Personalized feed doesn't work because of limited content.
To fix above problem dev.to needs to separate discussions with articles, make it looks like a discussion centric community like Github discussions but also maintain a section of curated topic-wise quality articles as a learning source. Dev.to also should hire more technical writers to write less popular topics.
In the end it's all about perceived impression. What if dev.to wants to keep everything the same? I think it's fine if dev.to team happy with current status and want to pivot new products before dev.to declines. This site already reached its peek.
Each site serves it own unique purpose. Combine geeksforgeeks.org content with dev.to comment section will be dope!
Latest comments (0)