So I've been a member of Dev.to since 2018. I wrote my first post on Aug 17, 2018. Just to give you a reference that I've been on here for a while....
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I relate to this post and I think my interpretation of what happened comes down to 3 things that all happened around the same time (These are listed from least to most impactful to me personally) :
1 - I was promoted to Trusted User | At first it wasn't a problem, I would admin upvote/downvote and flag as spam when it came up during my normal reading until...
2 - The influx of spam | I used to read the latest feed and check my notifications. At some point the Latest feed became so filled with spam that I stopped reading it at all because I was spending just as much time going through the mod tools to mark things as spam as I was reading anything.
3 - The loss of Connect | To me, this was when I really stopped feeling connected to the platform. Instead of being able to quickly message my friends here, I now had to seek them out on other platforms - and of course not everyone was on any single platform, so it led to a fragmented feeling of community that Twitter/Discord/Slack DM's didn't fill. Comments obviously still exist, but I haven't seen a large amount of people that use it for the "Hey this was cool!" comment - and it doesn't feel like a place for a tangential conversation like Connect Chat did.
The loss of Connect felt particularly noticeable with Codeland since the remove of the feature. As someone who doesn't like Discord as a chat platform for large groups of people, I inherently feel less part of what's going on during Codeland since I don't participate in the conversations anymore. I know this is a very me centered analysis of the situation, but is a huge part of why I ended up posting to my personal blog when I do periodically write something, and only sometimes posting here afterwards.
It makes me a bit sad to reflect on this - I've had some excellent experiences through DEV (and CodeNewbies) and met some of the most incredible friends. But most (all?) of those people have moved away from DEV as far as I can tell and stopped writing, and it's led me to feel less inclined to write as well.
This is a really helpful comment, Tyler!
I'm really sorry that being a Trusted Member put you in a position that made DEV less fun. If you're spending all this time cleaning up spam and not finding enjoyable posts to read, that wouldn't be a great experience. 😞
Something that has changed over the past 6 months is that we have another layer of defense against spam through a program that Ben created called Forem Shield. We have various folks combing through posts using this tool and help us to remove spam now. We still have the same tools for Trusted Members to fight spam, but hopefully we're getting better at proactively fighting it so that it's not the primary thing that Trusted Members have to deal with anymore. This is something that we've been working on for about the past 6 months and I hope it's having a positive effect. I'd like for our Trusted Members to be able to put more focus on reading posts and helping the community than fighting spam; I need to work on making this all clearer.
But also, I understand that you have other concerns. On the note of us removing Connect, I do feel like this is a pretty big loss that we haven't been able to easily replace with Discord. And, you're absolutely right that we have had some great members of the community move on... I'd really like to try and think of a way to bring folks back, even if they can't be here all the time, perhaps just for a temporary reunion. I'll have to think about how we might approach something like this. 🤔
All in all, I really appreciate your and DeChamp's candidness here. We really want to preserve the things that made DEV good for you both. Gonna give this some serious though and share y'all's points with the team.
Something I've consistently loved about DEV is that the Team is so active on the platform (and in a positive way unlike some other platforms' teams) 🥰
And like I said in the initial post - I think the Trusted Member experience was the least influential part of my experience, I just know it lined up well with my experience, so it felt disingenuous to leave it out.
Hey, thanks very much for your kind words! 😀
Also, I def want ya feeling comfortable expressing these feelings without you having to worry about how it might affect our feelings... I read this and react because I wanna continue to improve things, but I definitely don't see it and think oh I have to defend against this. Your message was very thoughtful and honest to your personal experience, and I can def understand where ya are coming from. It is seriously very helpful feedback.
I'm glad you read the message as a sign of reaching out and not complaining. I tried really hard to make it a constructive comment for us all to discuss and talk through. I'm glad it's working. Pat yourself on the back for taking the effort to keep us answered.
Thanks so much for this message. 💚 I totally know y'all mean well here... y'all are both fantastic DEV community members that have been here a good long time. And while I know we can't turn back the wheels of time, this is really helpful feedback for giving us a sense of things we need to work on to rekindle the spark that drew y'all in in the first place.
Thank you for posting your thoughts on this. I appreciated reading it. It's nice to know the feeling is not just mine alone. It's also nice to see the dev. to staff take notice and leave comment. Maybe it'll spark change but perhaps things will remain as they are and we may have to learn to adapt or find new grounds. Either way, i wish you well on your journey. I'll give you a follow.
I don't have a great answer here right now, but just wanted to acknowledge your post and say this is something I believe we would very much like to figure out. We don't want folks getting lost in the sea of posts here and we need to continue thinking through how to solve this one.
I appreciate you responding, that makes me feel seen right there! I do have to say that the people that work on the dev.to site kind and supportive. It's much appreciated.
SEO spam is certainly a huge problem. But maybe it is only the tip of the iceber. I am under the impression that a lot of content isn't posted in the first place with the intention that a community engages with it in a meaningful sense (at least beyond rather shallow metrics as number of readers and likes).