Hey folks!
We recently posted the DEV Community Satisfaction Survey and would love for y’all’s participation. ❤️
However, along with the survey, we’re hoping to gather some more qualitative feedback about what brought you here and what keeps you coming back.
So, with that in mind, would you please describe why you joined DEV and why you’ve stuck around? You may make your answer as long or short as you’d like.
Thanks so much for being part of the DEV community! 🙌
Top comments (53)
The small community is what keeps this site interesting, and it sounds like those days are nearly over which is both good and bad.
Some of the posts are low quality (probably because the increase in the site's popularity). I think there should be measures in place to reduce or filter out low quality content. Perhaps there could be settings to tailor your feed, or maybe it should be more difficult to post common topics. As someone who reads a lot, I would enjoy more unique content, but for newbies, they could probably benefit from repetition.
Also, I think there should be an incentive to make high quality content. If the good writers are only rewarded with name recognition they'll resort to other means of income such as sponsored posts.
That's my quick two cents.
Edit: Wording
I understand that as the consumer it's not great to see this over and over and over- but from the creator side I would view this as almost the "Hello, World" of writing posts.
It may not be particularly engaging, but it can function as a stepping stone for someone to get more comfortable with writing and expressing their ideas and start getting involved with the community - and even beyond that, everyone has their own spin on it that might help someone else down the road!
Everybody has to start somewhere :)
As a community mod I've seen tools for rating how "advanced" a post is, and I wonder how much utilization those get. They're kind of tucked away. It might be valuable to let authors indicate whether their posts are geared toward beginners, intermediate, senior, or architect-level devs. I can imagine there's an audience for the "todo app tutorial" posts (other devs at the todo-app stage of their career) and another audience who doesn't care for that kind of content but would really enjoy some advanced under-the-hood deep dives on e.g. how the .NET framework handles async/await and threading.
This is available for every author on their own post as well - but you have to know to go to your post after you publish it in order to set the level (at least if you're on the old post editor/creator).
Maybe it would be helpful for that rating to be on the post edit page and not hidden in the manage section of published posts?
Y'all both bring up excellent points about the experience level being really difficult to discover — both for mods and for authors.
In case any onlooking authors are struggling to find where to go to set the experience level of their own post, you can get to it by clicking the "manage" button that sits at the top right hand side of your published post (alternatively, you can append
/manageto your post's URL)You'll then be taken to a place that looks like so:
All this said, I def agree that this option should be easier to reach and likely built directly into the editor. I also agree that if we can make it a more regularly used thing by authors, it would be really helpful for readers that are looking to filter out beginner OR advanced posts from their feeds.
Would it make sense to crowdsource that rating, so anyone reading the article can rate the experience level?
I also have access to the moderator tools and I usually only skim over articles to weed out obvious spam, and don't really fully read them. So most of the time I'm not really qualified to rate the experience level.
Also when the article is about some technology or framework I'm not experienced with, it's hard to judge.
Heyo Thomas! Thanks so much for weighing in.
I totally hear ya that the mindset of moderating spam is quite different than that of setting experience level for a post. Moderating spam does indeed call for scanning articles, while setting experience level would mean thoroughly reading and digesting the material of a post. Both are helpful things, but as the primary mod leader I think I've really been more focused on spam fighting over setting experience level — over the coming months, I'll probably do more to encourage moderators to set experience level and use the 👍/👎 to help us with quality control.
All this said, I really like the idea of crowdsourcing the experience rating. I'm gonna bring that one up with the team!
I totally agree with your point. I was hesitant to even post my comment because as a frequent user of StackOverflow and Reddit, I know how frustrating it can be to be blocked from sharing. Hopefully the Dev team finds a happy medium if they decide to go this route.
Newcomers are just as important to the community as anyone else.
Word up! I think your point is totally valid and am grateful for your honesty. You can bet that we'll continue working to find the best balance we can, but keep the constructive criticism coming, that's how we gauge how well things are working for y'all or not. 🙂
But also, just appreciate ya following up and giving a shoutout to newcomers! 🙌
Really good point, Tyler! I can totally understand new folks coming in and posting a tutorial like this — it's a good way for them to test the waters with writing!
On the flip though, I can also understand Wade's point that it's frustrating for readers who are here regularly to see duplicate content.
It's such a careful balance to strike — allowing authors the freedom to post what they want & have a fair chance at getting their work discovered, while also providing readers the tools to tailor their personal feed. But, this is exactly the kinda nuance that we really wanna figure out.
We'll continue to think on this and if any onlookers are struck with an idea, don't hesitate to share it with us in our repo via GitHub Discussions!
I would say that the repetitive content is okay as long as it's more rewarding to do well prepared, well researched and interesting articles!
There is also a popularity bias that may lead to an oligarchy where a few people are very popular and (although creating good articles) will always get the most views likes etc.
A rewarding system should therefore be fair and solely focus on the content and article quality.
I have no solution on how to implement sich a system, I am no social engineer, but I hope these words may become valid requirements.
Dunno, tbh I could use a refresher on how functions work in javascript /s
Really appreciate your feedback and constructive criticism!
The hope that the quality of the posts increases in time.
But I am nearly hopeless.
Create an extra space for those "writers" who thinks "Hello World" is the new shit on the block. But it seems that this problem arises also in medium and hashnode. The new credo seems to be: I write so I am.
I have been gone three times because of this. Hopefully there will be another site or at least an area free of those post and someone who cares about the stuff written here.
It is a little bit like TikTok for developers. Look and see me, how great I am.
In these times every one is fabulous, but this is simply not true and we should not write about stuff only for ourselves - look I have written a post.
Think first, write second.
Write for the reader, not for the writer.
I have nothing against post from beginners, but please spend more than a minute to write a post.
From observations here and on Hashnode I get that nowadays it's part of a bootcamp process to start blogging and document the progress. Which is good for learners but, as you pointed out, not so much for a community. I wonder what would be a good solution for that, because detecting such posts and shadowbanning them seems too hostile.
Yes thats true, so we should have an area for that: Bootcamp Writing.
And everything that seems to be something like that is moved there.
Maybe we need a pay per post for posts that wants to get into the non Bootcamp Writing.
And you get money back, if your post is voted up to ....
That's a bit extreme but some sort of screening mechanism could help. Perhaps readers could opt in to some sort of program to help new writers.
I come back to DEV for two things.
For me, DEV is a place of exchange, articles and know-how/creation that is pretty cool to read. You can find everything, and the community is friendly.
Just set the
/feedproperly, and I'll come back to it more than once/twice a day, believe me!Because even though I have hidden and set my #tags values well, sometimes I have posts that really don't interest me, and it annoys me to see that.
The team behind is super great, and the ecosystem Forem is awesome ♥
Thanks so much for sharing the things that keep ya coming back to DEV, Thomas! Really appreciate your kind words. 😀
Community is great.
The DNA is different compared to Reddit, Hashnode, in a positive way.
Also the content is really good and I'm learning a lot from others.
🚀🚀
I agree with what you says, I find the DEV community more fun to read despite the spam (which is quickly handled). 👍👍👍
Woot! So glad to hear we have our own distinctive style going on. TY so much for sharing your thoughts!
I personally like helping others to give back to the community.
skills
I found very skilled people back those days when I started developing like Codrops and some other sites that are dead these days, I get to know how to deal with things that are quite advanced and I loved diving through this sites, trying to understand the implementations, following the tutorials and hopefully build something on my own that replicates the same with a different concept.
feedback
I like both to give feedback and write posts so I can get feedback as well and while the community itself has some inherent issues (always have been like that) like fanboying a given tech or sticking to a single tool in a vague try to rule them all, there are also tones of nice people that really try to understand what's behind the scenes and that's curious about whatever they found here and that's the best part 😁
Dev-Diary
There's yet another reason for writing posts that may also be the reason for what @wadecodez said. If you write a post about a topic, you get -more or less- forced to deep dive a bit more on the topic and try to write in a way it can be comprehended for any other reading it so you end up learning more and also the posts serve as own dev-diary to which you can come back at any time to modify and polish according to the feedback received and your learning stage.
You may find thousand tutorials on how to make a todo app but they may be categorized using different tech stacks -thus being good for comparing- and they can deep to a given detail point or give more or less advice for newbies so it doesn't harm anybody IMO.
Community Engagement
I expend some time weekly giving feedback to people by commenting on other's posts, discussions or help posts, either be correcting incorrect concepts, pointing out possible issues or concerns on implementations or simply to encourage the people to keep writing interesting things.
Giving back and grow together
I also learn more by giving feedback, because sometimes I need to search the details on a thing to add proper information on a topic and other times I need to ask on topics that are not on my mental encyclopedia 😂
I also enjoy to watch people's knowledge evolution through the time as well, I worked as web dev teacher for a couple of years and it's one thing I liked on that job so I extrapolate it to my junior teammates and the community in a way or another and as best as I can.
What an awesomely detailed answer! 🔥
It's so great hearing the many different ways in which you interact with folks in the community. Thanks so much for being a rock solid contributor in our community!
You're welcome Michael,
You give to the community and the community gives back to you somehow 😁
very unique platform, truly inclusive, fantastic authors.
I decided to give some time to help moderate the quality, though, as there are LOTS of spams and even some malicious content, which becomes problematic.
Comment section is great, maybe it's related to the kind of posts I read but I feel that it aggregates a lot and wheneaver possible I try to contribute to it.
My main problem is that finding good reads has become increainsgly hard. I follow some tags but still I get spammed with an unreasonable amount of "Top 10 X for Y" and "how to X on javascript" on my relevant feed.
Thanks so much for providing us this feedback, Fen. 🙏
We'll continue on the quest to make good reads easier to discover! And we def wanna ensure that Top 10s don't rule the roost, so will have to keep digging in here.
I don't really remember why I initially joined DEV almost 2 years ago. I think a web search for something (don't remember what) lead me to someone's post.
After that I started browsing while drinking morning coffee or tea.
Discussion in comments are at times just as interesting as the post itself, sometimes more so. Except in rare occasions, discussions are civilized even when people are disagreeing over something. Most criticism I see in comments tends to be constructive, and expressed appropriately, as well as taken well by the post author (e.g., I've seen many edit posts to make corrections).
Overall, DEV is a very welcoming community.
One issue I've noticed, that is really external and probably nothing DEV can really do about it, relates to a questionable website that has been large scale scraping DEV, changing random words, and posting as their own. Literally the entire site appears to be scraped from DEV. But mostly unintelligible due to whatever automated attempt they make to replace words. Someone posted about this a few weeks ago. I'll track it down and edit my comment with link to the DEV post I'm referring to.
Literally within an hour or two tops of posting on DEV, this other site will have their infringed garbage version up. It is easy enough to get Google to remove it from index with Google's DMCA dashboard, but annoying none-the-less. The hosting provider used by that site doesn't respond to email to their abuse address.
Update: Here's a link to the DEV post I mentioned that discussed this very issue. It doesn't mention the infringing site by name just like I didn't in this comment. I'm sure I experienced same site this post refers to.
How To Report a Site That Steals Your Articles
Dennis Persson ・ Jun 5 ・ 6 min read
Thanks so much for sharing your thoughts on this, Vincent. I'm so happy to hear that you feel this is a welcoming, inclusive community — that is something that we continually strive for here and really you all are the ones that make it happen. 🙌
As for those sites that scrape DEV and repost all of our community members' post with slight edits, I just can't say enough how crappy that is. There are a handful of sites doing this, and I think I know the one that you're likely referring to... I actually wrote an internal guide for our team about how to approach these situations: how to see if we can programmatically block the site from scraping us, how to find out who is hosting a website, & how to file a complaint with a hosting provider. But, you're absolutely right that we're somewhat limited as to what we can do! Still, any onlookers, don't hesitate to hit us up at yo@dev.to if your work here is being copied elsewhere — we will fight this alongside you!
Lastly, I'm totally gonna have to read over Dennis' post.. I bet there's some other good advice in there that we could use!
Dennis's post is really good. The hosting provider of the site is not responsive, at least not to me. But Google is faster than I would have guessed to remove from index. I imagine enough of those requests from enough people against same site would probably push them way down in search results overall.
I joined quite some time ago, when Dev was still relatively young. As it is built on top of Rails, it attracted some folks from Ruby community. Unfortunately, nowadays I rarely see content that would be interesting for me. And even when I see it, it's usually with 3 likes and 0 comments. So I cannot share the enthusiasm of others, that Dev is for great discussions and community interactions.
It's a good platform though and I believe it convinced many people to start blogging, which is great.
Really appreciate your constructive criticism, Paweł!
We still got a lotta work to do on ensuring that folks see more of what they're most interested in and less of what they're not. You can trust that we'll keep thinking on how to best do this!
Community is fantastic. The quality of comments is really high, and I learn a lot from everyone, even when criticized , it's done intelligently and constructively !
I've already kind of said this, but I want to reiterate it; You've got an amazing UI for authors! I love the process of writing articles here. Very pleasant!
Woot! Thanks a bunch, Thomas. 🙌
Really happy to hear that our editor and accompanying UI offers such a great experience!
It's well deserved. Luv the Markdown edge, and really everything - In addition to of course the people :)
I like reading and I'm always coming back hopeful of finding a few nuggets of wisdom here c:
Also, people are nice here! except when you make an article explaining your thoughts on why you think PHP is good or why you think Tailwind sucks. For some reason, it makes people really angry 😂
DEV content seems to be more open-minded than StackOverflow posts, more tech-focused than "Tech Twitter", and more detailed than both of them. But some people tend to produce too much content, making it hard to find out the articles that are helpful and relevant to me.
I already tried to elaborate on this issue in my article about quality vs. quantity/consistency: Stop rewarding quantity!
Stop rewarding quantity!
Ingo Steinke ・ Jan 17 ・ 5 min read
DEV is really beginner friendly, and there is essentially no gatekeeper. I don't mind people posting low quality content, everyone need to start somewhere. TODO tutorials or so are like HELLO WORLD to the writers, it just does not work out when people expect newcomers to have reference articles in the first place.
Sadly, this is not acceptable on platforms like StackOverflow or Reddit. Certainly, you have to get better overtime or else, no one will see your content.
Joining DEV has been one of my greatest decision this year as many new oppurtunities have come to me because of this.
I thought of a great example of how welcoming DEV is. The feature where someone can post a question, etc anonymously. I've never used it to post. But I've read several of those anonymous posts. I think I only commented once or twice in those posts with advice because by the time I've read them, the comment section is almost always full of good advice for the anonymous post author. Usually someone has already shared what I would have said. It is a great example of how supportive the DEV community is.