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How to make the most of DEV if you’re over Twitter

Ben Halpern on November 02, 2022

Twitter has played an important role for software developers over the last decade or so. It’s been the de facto networking hub of sorts, and it’s p...
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Amara Graham

I've met so many people IRL and on Twitter by following them on Dev!

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Ugo Nwokoro

You must be great at networking! Teach me 😪

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Amara Graham

Just start hitting that follow button!!

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Jamie Livingstone

I have been a member here for a few years but haven't actively participated in the community. I have started spending more time on the site recently and must admit that the community here is excellent.

I am planning to leave Twitter as I only used it for technology news, and I am looking forward to contributing and learning here.

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Ben Halpern

That's really great to hear Jamie!

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tkane2000
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Erin Bensinger

💡 Tip: if you need more help finding writers to follow, check out the Follow Friday Series posts on topics that interest you! Happy following ✨

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Ben Halpern

Oh yeah, great call!

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Joshua Amaju

The last post was in may

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Erin Bensinger

That's actually the first post — you can scroll to the bottom of that page to see the latest post, which went out today.

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Chris Jarvis

Great series. I've followed some great people from it. Another place to find writers to follow id the top 7 of the week posts.

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Glenn A Miller

Thanks for the tip. Very useful.

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Diner Das

Wow, I definitely wasn't following enough people here.

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Patrick Londa

Thanks for shouting out The Ops Community, @ben! 🙌

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Chris Wald • Edited

The ability to personalize the weight attribute for each tag is so uniquely cool. I feel like when I start following topics on other sites, my initial interactions cause my feed to become over-saturated with 1-2 things that don't really encapsulate my interests the way this does!

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Sreekanth

@ben Great timing.

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Marcelo Arias

Great tips! 😁

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Maxi Contieri

amazing !

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Rolf Streefkerk

It's good to see that Twitter will eventually be taken off the advertisers life support and is moving towards a more neutral position where everyone can benefit from a broad range discussions. Perhaps I'll start using it again at some point in the future next to Dev as tech news / discussion platforms.

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Leonardo Montini

For each of your most important tags, click into that tag and select by “top this month”, and see who is posting interesting stuff. Follow all of those people.

That's smart 🤔

How do people get picked up on those lists?

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Ben Halpern

That is 100% algorithmic. It's mostly a tally of reactions, with moderators having more weight in the outcomes than average users.

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Leonardo Montini

Cool, thank you!

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Fyodor

It would be great to have a decent blocking/muting functionality (for tags/users) — the way it works currently is not 100% ideal tbh, and it would really help to improve user feeds, I believe, and customize them better.

(For now tag filtering by weight is quite cumbersome and doesn't always work, and user blocking doesn't usually work on iOS for instance at all.)

IMO, these are important parts of user experience in terms of selective reading.

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Ben Halpern

Hear you on all of this!

We have work going on to improve on this. Anticipate improvements soon, this is definitely an area of focus.

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Glen Little

One issue with a walled garden like this is that my life spans multiple areas of interest and I would need to find communities for each. On Twitter, I can interact with a variety of people, not just other developers. That said, I do want to come here to get good articles!

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Bobby Iliev

DEV ❤️

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Lucas Winkler

Thanks!

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Michael

Never got into Twitter and only seen much on it second hand...which is fine by me. I have had a great experience here on DEV though I haven't been consistent about it. Will be interesting to see how things go, in our industry the only constant is change, some big and some small.

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Susan Winters

I’m having to go back to websites that let you login with your Twitter ID and change. I also recently deactivated my Facebook so can’t login with that button either. I ❤️ Websites that let you login with your GitHub account or LinkedIn because I will probably never leave those accounts.
I loved your email about this topic that linked me to this page.

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EECOLOR

"How to make the most of your home feed" - I hope the algorithm you are implementing does not fall into the same trap as the one traditional social media are fighting against. Their original algorithms feed the confirmation bias and create 'information bubbles'.

For example, it takes quite some effort to see video's from the left and the right on Youtube. If I like articles about functional programming, it does not mean I don't want to know about object oriented programming or logic programming.

This is not an easy problem to solve but I hope you are taking this into account.

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devinthemtn • Edited

Also could move @thepracticaldev to a mastodon server?

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Erin Bensinger • Edited

We're currently crossposting to mastodon.social/@thepracticaldev !

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Ravavyr

Can someone point me at the repo code that handles the "experience level" logic?
I'm curious what selecting 1 does versus selecting 5
If someone can explain it here, that'd be cool too.

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Manav Misra

I deleted Twitter this past week. Minimal regrets.

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🇵🇷 bonafide Señor Pinky 👁️♥️2️⃣💪♀️⚙️👩‍💻

One more tip that I would add, is to find 1 or more Discord communities that are relative to you dev stack.

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Nikola Stojaković

Yes it is. No one is attacking free speech. Free speech means that government can't prosecute you for the things you say.

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jinacker

Thank for your writing. Wonderful

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Rutam Prita Mishra

This is really helpful Ben. A must read!

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Lori Goldman

Well done, @ben!!! This post is gold!!!

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Lori Goldman

I gave you a shout-out on LinkedIn because this post is outstanding and my 1k+ network needed to see such compelling, spot on messaging.

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Soni Paplekaj

Why is dev so slow?I just want to know ur opinions

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Moeki Kawakami

Come to think of it, Podcast is also "more independent web".