Wordpress, blogspot, ghost, and analogous blogging platforms have always felt to me much more metered, where everything you write is assumed to be drafted and carefully considered. Twitter has decent support for effort-posting but it feels like a hack (drafting threads specifically), and the good writing that comes out of Twitter seems like it exists despite Twitter's design, not because of it. Facebook has the obvious limitation of mostly being an IRL social network, with only mild support for long-form content (FB notes are extremely dead, and long-form content exists behind several read-mores, mixed in with your old high-school friends' selfies).
Dev.to perfectly bridges this gap: it offers a great interface for writing long-form content, while still retaining the trappings of an informal social network. Writing here also feels relatively protected, and not quite as public as writing in other places, due to the cozy community vibes it gives off.
I imagine that writing here will be a perfect place to test-drive ideas for essays and longer posts and to interact with other people putting a similar amount of effort into their writing: enough that it's substantial, but not so much that it's perfectly polished.
All this being said, maybe it's just the monospace font for article drafts?
Oldest comments (3)
Pretty interesting take!
It's nice being able to make substantial posts without feeling like they have to be fully developed, well-cited, or extremely thorough! Thanks for the cool (and very beautiful and welcoming) site :)
You have concisely explained most of the reasons why I started using this site. I wish there were more communities like this one, but for topics not related to programming.