I have also noticed that there is a huge imbalance between sub-communities and the content on DEV. It makes sense that there would be A LOT of JavaScript, CSS, and React content. There's a significant amount of overlap between those topics and the content that bootcamp and college gradutes would seek to produce. This is because it's accessible to newcomers! These web-based languages and frameworks were designed to be as accessible, and as free-form as possible, so that their popularity would explode.
Of course, that doesn't mean that the other topics (Dev Ops, Dev Relations, C, C++, Go, Ruby, Python, etc.) aren't growing. It just means they aren't growing as explosively. That makes sense since they are smaller and serve different niches.
I've often thought about how my most popular post, that still gets traffic is a post about my very custom hosting solution for WordPress that I haven't used or supported in years:
Of course WordPress has it's own sub-communities and has been around for quite some time. I developed and sold solutions with WordPress for several years, but eventually lost interest for it. It's bewildering that a better solution hasn't come along and completely invalidated my old custom setup. Every now and then someone comes along to squeeze that post for one last drop of knowledge. I don't think that this phenomenon is limited to WordPress or PHP or any part of that ecosystem.
My journey while building Twitch chat bots became it's own series of posts, because of the numerous pitfalls that I encountered:
This post also gets recurring traffic, even ~4 years later, because there's a hole in the documentation for creating Twitch bots. In order to create one, without any prior knowledge, you have scour the developer forums for hours. There are little nuggets of knowledge throughout those forums, and they're often more valuable than the official documentation, because documentation isn't a priority for Twitch. I open-sourced the code that I used in this series, because no equivalent references existed.
I think the void of content we are seeing is due to a lack of senior developers whom have already walked the poorly documented path and have not turned around to share their experience. Junior developers are writing and sharing so often, because they are trying to claw their way into the industry and make themselves known. That's the reality that senior developers and executives have created for them. However, the same rule-makers aren't as likely to reach down and help those less experienced than themselves. Thus we have a knowledge sharing gap in the industry. Changing this would require a complete mindset shift in the industry, which we all know isn't going to happen any time soon.
We are seeing this translate to DEV, as more and more of our industry joins.
Solutions
Having a manually curated feed (anything larger than the top posts mailing list) would be very unmaintainable and would not scale, and opens itself to a whole can of worms regarding impartiality, etc. The DEV community has a growing number of moderators, whom help to filter out posts and comments from bad actors. This is great! However, I suspect that the tagging system could be improved. Currently the tag list for each post is limited to 4 tags.
I think that this prevents a lot of specificity when it comes to posts. So, often I'll see a #showdev post that is also about JS, CSS, and React, but is really an advertisement for this independently developed product. Many other social platforms, which is what DEV truly is, have certain requirements for disclaiming sponsorships or advertisements that fall under the category of native advertising. I think a good thought experiment would be to explore expanding the number of tags allowed, OR having a reserved set of tags that can be used in combination with the normal custom tag list.
That way authors could be more specific with the intended audience for a post, rather than every post having the same set of tags, e.g. #showdev #js #web #design. This limitation leads to an imbalance of volume on popular tags, which I would assume makes it harder for tag moderators to help.
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I have also noticed that there is a huge imbalance between sub-communities and the content on DEV. It makes sense that there would be A LOT of JavaScript, CSS, and React content. There's a significant amount of overlap between those topics and the content that bootcamp and college gradutes would seek to produce. This is because it's accessible to newcomers! These web-based languages and frameworks were designed to be as accessible, and as free-form as possible, so that their popularity would explode.
Of course, that doesn't mean that the other topics (Dev Ops, Dev Relations, C, C++, Go, Ruby, Python, etc.) aren't growing. It just means they aren't growing as explosively. That makes sense since they are smaller and serve different niches.
I've often thought about how my most popular post, that still gets traffic is a post about my very custom hosting solution for WordPress that I haven't used or supported in years:
Hosting WordPress over HTTPS with Docker
Forest Hoffman ・ Sep 29 '17 ・ 12 min read
My journey while building Twitch chat bots became it's own series of posts, because of the numerous pitfalls that I encountered:
Building a Twitch.tv Chat Bot with Go - Part 1
Forest Hoffman ・ Dec 20 '17 ・ 4 min read
I think the void of content we are seeing is due to a lack of senior developers whom have already walked the poorly documented path and have not turned around to share their experience. Junior developers are writing and sharing so often, because they are trying to claw their way into the industry and make themselves known. That's the reality that senior developers and executives have created for them. However, the same rule-makers aren't as likely to reach down and help those less experienced than themselves. Thus we have a knowledge sharing gap in the industry. Changing this would require a complete mindset shift in the industry, which we all know isn't going to happen any time soon.
We are seeing this translate to DEV, as more and more of our industry joins.
Solutions
Having a manually curated feed (anything larger than the top posts mailing list) would be very unmaintainable and would not scale, and opens itself to a whole can of worms regarding impartiality, etc. The DEV community has a growing number of moderators, whom help to filter out posts and comments from bad actors. This is great! However, I suspect that the tagging system could be improved. Currently the tag list for each post is limited to 4 tags.
I think that this prevents a lot of specificity when it comes to posts. So, often I'll see a #showdev post that is also about JS, CSS, and React, but is really an advertisement for this independently developed product. Many other social platforms, which is what DEV truly is, have certain requirements for disclaiming sponsorships or advertisements that fall under the category of native advertising. I think a good thought experiment would be to explore expanding the number of tags allowed, OR having a reserved set of tags that can be used in combination with the normal custom tag list.
That way authors could be more specific with the intended audience for a post, rather than every post having the same set of tags, e.g. #showdev #js #web #design. This limitation leads to an imbalance of volume on popular tags, which I would assume makes it harder for tag moderators to help.