🚨May I Have Your Attention Please? 🚨
Today we have exciting news for you! We’ve been working hard to deliver a whole new set of features for daily.dev. Our new version (2.19.0) is all about you. After talking with many amazing people who use daily.dev, we wanted to ship a new version that would make the experience:
- 🙌 Democratic - we are giving more power to you, our community. We want you to decide on important things like content quality and post ranking.
- 🤝 Interactive - we give you the ability to meet other community members. You can do it through meaningful discussions on trending dev news.
- 🤘 Inspiring - learn from other developers. Share your insights and collaborate with awesome people to create valuable knowledge.
That’s all thanks to the valuable feedback you guys are giving us all the time. We couldn’t do it without your help. Enough of that! Let us walk you through the changes! 🎉
Oh, and don’t forget to update to the latest version. Here is how to update Chrome/Firefox extensions manually.
New post ranking system (aka upvotes) ⬆️
Up until now, our (not so secret) algorithm used to rank posts based on engagement. That means that the more people viewed a specific post, the higher it was listed. The problem is that unique views don’t reflect the quality of the content.
That leads us to introduce Upvotes. From now on, you can influence the ranking of an article by giving it an upvote. We didn’t drop the previous ranking system. Posts will be ranked based on the entire community’s upvotes in addition to the unique views (but upvotes will have a higher weight in our ranking algorithm).
More Discussions. More Interactions. 🥳
daily.dev is first and foremost a community of developers gathering around discovering the latest dev news. The only thing left is to give you the ability to interact with other awesome devs on our network. In this version, you will be able to start a discussion about each post.
You can discuss with anyone! Not only daily.dev’s extension users. How come? Because we made the discussion page 100% web. Each article is getting a unique link that you can share with your friends and colleagues.
How does it work?
- Click on a post to read it or click upvote.
- Text box dialog will appear on the post’s card.
- Insert your comment and click “POST.”
- A new tab will open with the new web app we developed for making discussions.
- Share the web page with your friends and team members.
What kind of discussions will be there?
It is up to you and the entire community. We recommend to try and share:
- Share an insight you got from reading the article.
- Make a TL;DR so that other devs can save their time.
- Make a dev joke (but only it’s really good) 😅
Putting Awesome Devs (You) In The Center 👨💻
For every post, the comment with most upvotes will be featured on the main feed of daily.dev browser extension. Yes, you read it right! You can actually appear on the feed and get your comment exposed to tens of thousands of devs worldwide!
That is how it looks like in real life:
Fewer Distractions More Focus 🎯
We have completely redesigned the post structure! We created a new design aimed at reducing distractions—fewer buttons, title first, and no animations. Besides, we revamped our grid to be a symmetrical, static grid. That way, you’ll need much less energy to go through your feed.
Take a look at how much cleaner it is now:
Card Mode
List Mode (aka Insane Mode)
Major Performance Improvement 🚴🏻♀️
When we sketched the new design, we focused on performance. We wanted to introduce lightweight components with the least javascript possible. The previous design required so much javascript to initialize every card, and it could cause memory and CPU spikes. Another weak spot was the masonry grid that was implemented in javascript. We reimplemented it to a symmetric grid that is 100% CSS. You should experience faster load times and scrolling. As always, we would appreciate feedback 🙏
One Important Step Towards The Web 🌏
We know many of you want daily.dev to be 100% web. That makes sense, and we are making the first steps towards it. Not that the discussion function is in a web app you can enjoy using daily.dev with friends who don’t have the extension.
On that note, we want to share that in the coming weeks, we will say goodbye to Daily Go (the previous PWA we made for consuming dev news on your mobile device). That move is essential to make progress with the new web app.
We are in beta 🔧
The new web app is still in beta. It means that we are testing different functionalities to see which one resonates with you and our community’s members. We would appreciate any feedback you can share with us. 🙏🏼
Wrap up 🦸♂️
So what did we cover here?
- We made a new epic version focused on you! Make sure you update the extension.
- New post ranking system based on upvotes and unique views.
- You can create discussions on trending dev news (in beta)
- You can be featured on the daily.dev feed with a popular comment on a post.
- We redesigned the post structure, and the feed’s grid to reduce distractions.
- The app is much faster now. We made some serious performance improvements.
- daily.dev is making its first step towards the web.
Our team would love to hear what you think about this version. Join the discussion here.
daily.dev delivers the best programming news every new tab. We will rank hundreds of qualified sources for you so that you can hack the future.
Top comments (8)
The update looks really cool! As much as the gifs in this post 😅
Nimrod, I am wondering, why didn't you guys START with a website but rather an extension?
Hi Paul, that's a great question we receive frequently.
The main reasons are:
Our community has been growing steadily and we are so proud of it. Everyone that helped deserves a huge thanks. As we scale, we start opening up toward having a web solution as well.
More to the community! It's aweosme 🔥
That's a really nice update 😍
Thanks, Garv!
Amazing news! Loving your extension buddies! 🤩
Thank you so much ❤️