First off, I wanted to congratulate you for this post. The content team found it to be informative, handy as a reference, and well thought-out. I know you’d have these questions whether publicly acknowledged your post or not but wanted to say this up front. Spoiler alert: while we haven’t published the Top 7 yet, we will shortly and your post is one of the articles chosen. I also want you to know that we were not pressured to pick your article because of this discussion. We were planning to pick it yesterday.
Now, on to your questions...
What dictates what is promoted on social media?
We have a team of social media content specialists that scan tag pages and the home feed and then primarily pull quotes from the articles chosen to draft and schedule social posts. The entire goal here is to promote our community members in their words much more often than we promote DEV as a company. Our social content specialists are careful to do what we call “balancing the feeds”. This means that while they certainly look at popular posts (towards the top of dev.to/top/week), they are also careful to ensure we aren’t only promoting authors within one community, gender, race, or one subject.
What dictates top comments in the newsletter / weekly post?
Here’s how the process of creating the top 7 usually works:
We begin by looking at dev.to/top/week to see what articles are getting a lot of attention and are particularly “beloved” that week.
We scroll all the way through and (in the very least) scan all of the posts we hadn’t already come across the week prior.
We take a look at particular tag pages like #a11y, #mentalhealth, #career, etc and select posts that are fantastically written, thoughtful, or helpful but might not have gotten picked up from our “top articles” algorithm/feed
From there, we hone in on a list of articles deemed to be the “Top” 7 according to the community in general and our content team. Similar to our social media feeds, we use a great deal of editorial curation to comb through our options and pick a list of authors and subjects that are diverse in every sense as much as possible.
I will also say that last week, we actually changed the name of the “Top 7 Most Popular [...]” to be the “Top 7 Featured” to better reflect this editorial process. We’ve been doing this series pretty much since DEV began, so it felt like it was time to update the name to match the way the volume of our content (and therefore, algorithm and curation process) has changed.
Is there a bit of luck involved as to which posts the DEV team happen to read, as I understand you can't possibly read them all?
There is definitely some luck involved here. We definitely can’t read everything but I will say that we are very sensitive to the fact that a lot of listicles get posted on DEV, some of which are low quality. Many folks (including members of the social media/content team) find particular listicles helpful so this is kind of subjective in terms of the curation process but we’ve been having a lot of conversations about doing a better job of being extra careful not to promote things that other team members feel are low effort lists on social media and in the Top 7/newsletter.
Timing of Top 7 candidates
We pick Top 7 content from the previous Monday through Sunday without any weight given to a particular day of the week.
Is there a way to promote a particular post that I want a few more eyeballs on via listings or some other method?
We used to have a “Suggest a Tweet” feature but, very recently, we got rid of it because it needs to be rebuilt and it wasn’t very usable for our social media team. While we consider a new method for getting your work in front of our team in an alternative way, you can certainly use DEV Listings to share your post. A lot of folks do this!
Comments/questions about reading time and article length.
Everyone comes to DEV to find different types of content. Some come here to find helpful resources to quickly reference – like you mentioned. Some actually want to find more longform articles. I will say that at DEV, we are always excited when we come across a fantastic long read, essay on the history of a particular technology, or in-depth explainer. It’s true that these kinds of posts don’t always pop off the way a listicle with buzzy words in the title get and that’s something we should address. One thought is for the DEV admins to create something like a #longform tag (or some kind of curated editor's tag) that folks could use to indicate these types of articles. Our content team could reference this when creating the Top 7 each week.
I hope these answers shed some light on your questions and concerns. DEV as a platform is not perfect and never finished. We’re always striving to improve every part of it, including the feed and our editorial curation process. We are listening around the clock and appreciate constructive feedback, always.
One of the most salient features of our Tech Hiring culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted.
Accessibility Specialist. I focus on ensuring content created, events held and company assets are as accessible as possible, for as many people as possible.
I edited the article to include this comment - I did say I thought this comment should be turned into part of the FAQs or something as it explains how DEV picks things beautifully and I am sure many others would have similar questions (but aren't loud mouths like me so don't ask 😉)! ❤
Accessibility Specialist. I focus on ensuring content created, events held and company assets are as accessible as possible, for as many people as possible.
One idea I had was that mods and DEV team have a set number of "super votes" each week that add certain articles to the pile to be looked at.
It could also have a secondary effect of adding a boost to that post in the feeds.
Finally "super voted" posts could have a slightly stronger boarder / some other feature to make them stand out as "DEV picks". This is an alternative idea to the pinned post experiment you ran, without it always being top of the feed?
Anyway it was just a thought as I am excited by the fact you are putting more into the curation aspect!
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Hi @inhuofficial .
First off, I wanted to congratulate you for this post. The content team found it to be informative, handy as a reference, and well thought-out. I know you’d have these questions whether publicly acknowledged your post or not but wanted to say this up front. Spoiler alert: while we haven’t published the Top 7 yet, we will shortly and your post is one of the articles chosen. I also want you to know that we were not pressured to pick your article because of this discussion. We were planning to pick it yesterday.
Now, on to your questions...
We have a team of social media content specialists that scan tag pages and the home feed and then primarily pull quotes from the articles chosen to draft and schedule social posts. The entire goal here is to promote our community members in their words much more often than we promote DEV as a company. Our social content specialists are careful to do what we call “balancing the feeds”. This means that while they certainly look at popular posts (towards the top of dev.to/top/week), they are also careful to ensure we aren’t only promoting authors within one community, gender, race, or one subject.
Here’s how the process of creating the top 7 usually works:
We begin by looking at dev.to/top/week to see what articles are getting a lot of attention and are particularly “beloved” that week.
We scroll all the way through and (in the very least) scan all of the posts we hadn’t already come across the week prior.
We take a look at particular tag pages like #a11y, #mentalhealth, #career, etc and select posts that are fantastically written, thoughtful, or helpful but might not have gotten picked up from our “top articles” algorithm/feed
From there, we hone in on a list of articles deemed to be the “Top” 7 according to the community in general and our content team. Similar to our social media feeds, we use a great deal of editorial curation to comb through our options and pick a list of authors and subjects that are diverse in every sense as much as possible.
I will also say that last week, we actually changed the name of the “Top 7 Most Popular [...]” to be the “Top 7 Featured” to better reflect this editorial process. We’ve been doing this series pretty much since DEV began, so it felt like it was time to update the name to match the way the volume of our content (and therefore, algorithm and curation process) has changed.
There is definitely some luck involved here. We definitely can’t read everything but I will say that we are very sensitive to the fact that a lot of listicles get posted on DEV, some of which are low quality. Many folks (including members of the social media/content team) find particular listicles helpful so this is kind of subjective in terms of the curation process but we’ve been having a lot of conversations about doing a better job of being extra careful not to promote things that other team members feel are low effort lists on social media and in the Top 7/newsletter.
We pick Top 7 content from the previous Monday through Sunday without any weight given to a particular day of the week.
We used to have a “Suggest a Tweet” feature but, very recently, we got rid of it because it needs to be rebuilt and it wasn’t very usable for our social media team. While we consider a new method for getting your work in front of our team in an alternative way, you can certainly use DEV Listings to share your post. A lot of folks do this!
Everyone comes to DEV to find different types of content. Some come here to find helpful resources to quickly reference – like you mentioned. Some actually want to find more longform articles. I will say that at DEV, we are always excited when we come across a fantastic long read, essay on the history of a particular technology, or in-depth explainer. It’s true that these kinds of posts don’t always pop off the way a listicle with buzzy words in the title get and that’s something we should address. One thought is for the DEV admins to create something like a
#longformtag (or some kind of curated editor's tag) that folks could use to indicate these types of articles. Our content team could reference this when creating the Top 7 each week.I hope these answers shed some light on your questions and concerns. DEV as a platform is not perfect and never finished. We’re always striving to improve every part of it, including the feed and our editorial curation process. We are listening around the clock and appreciate constructive feedback, always.
I hate sharing my work on Twitter, so I just wanted to say I'm super grateful that you are doing it often enough for me.
The longform tag would be a great addition to see!
Thanks Gracie, you answered everything perfectly!
I edited the article to include this comment - I did say I thought this comment should be turned into part of the FAQs or something as it explains how DEV picks things beautifully and I am sure many others would have similar questions (but aren't loud mouths like me so don't ask 😉)! ❤
I'm glad to hear that everything you were wondering about got addressed!
As for the FAQ section, thanks for the suggestion. We will take it under advisement 🙂
p.s. the #longform tag is a great idea.
One idea I had was that mods and DEV team have a set number of "super votes" each week that add certain articles to the pile to be looked at.
It could also have a secondary effect of adding a boost to that post in the feeds.
Finally "super voted" posts could have a slightly stronger boarder / some other feature to make them stand out as "DEV picks". This is an alternative idea to the pinned post experiment you ran, without it always being top of the feed?
Anyway it was just a thought as I am excited by the fact you are putting more into the curation aspect!