Accessibility First DevRel. I focus on ensuring content created, events held and company assets are as accessible as possible, for as many people as possible.
I think perhaps I should state that the consistency badge is one of the few that I actually like!
Yes it could encourage half-baked articles, you are correct (in fact I think it did result in me doing a "quick post" one week to continue the streak, which certainly adds validity to what you are saying!).
However consistency in writing is a massive win if you are new to writing and even if one of my contributions was not great it did encourage me to write when I might not have felt like it and subsequently enjoy writing the article!
As with anything it is a double edged sword!
As one of the people who loves DEV but will also criticise anything I think they are not doing correctly, I would also say that things seem to be improving, you do get the odd days where the feed looks like something from "the spam societies guide to spamming" but overall I think it is certainly on the right trajectory (the feed feels better now than 6 months ago and fewer "10 VS Code plugins that you must use" type posts seem to get into the top of the week position etc.).
I think the key to a good experience on DEV is to follow the people who write good content, whenever I see a notification from you or @afif, @alvaromontoro, @thormeier, @dailydevtips1 etc. I know I am going to enjoy it. (this is far from an exhaustive list of people who's articles I like!)
I do not envy the DEV team, trying to make a feed that rewards quality over pandering listicles is very difficult!
For example you said about the tags system, but that gets abused (add #javascript, #beginners and guarantee to get views!), manual moderation is linked to company biases so that becomes difficult to get right (if everyone in the company loves Rust for example then more Rust articles will fill the feed if manual intervention takes place) etc.
There are no great solutions, only better ones as every system can be gamed and is a victim of "give the people what they want to see", and a lot of people want to see listicles and click on clickbait titles (as you know I always walk a fine line where I make something appear clickbait but then (hopefully) deliver!).
It saddens me that authors like @samuelfaure don't like the platform anymore, I do understand, but at the same time I think all of the alternatives have similar issues and at least the DEV team appear to care a lot (even when I "butt heads" with them they are still passionate about their product and seem to care about quality)!
I think the key might be something I was thinking about for a while, which is to hand pick authors to form a "power team" of super high quality content and put them all together on a site. I own a2z.dev which would be an awesome domain for varied writers, so who knows, maybe we just all band together!
Anyway, I have gone off track, lots of food for thought, I will round up by saying it is a thought provoking and well written article and thank you! ❤🦄
Tags are more flexible than categories or topics of classic bulletin board discussion forums like daniweb, reddit, or quora, none of which I like to use. Probably I wouldn't really like Usenet (aka newsgroups) anymore as well. DEV offers discussion and inspiration without the visual ugliness of bulletin boards but still on a higher technical level than medium, tealfeed etc.
The hand picked authors idea seems appealing, but how are those biased who are supposed to pick? This might lead to a similar "always the same" feeling that some conferences already suffer, and once we start to focus on the power team blog, who would still follow and engage with newcomers on DEV to recognize when some of the listicle noobs have evolved to become authors we might want to feature?
Accessibility First DevRel. I focus on ensuring content created, events held and company assets are as accessible as possible, for as many people as possible.
To get “fresh blood” into the group I would suggest that as the authors stumble across great articles they explore someone’s other work. If they consistently produce high quality articles (I mean majority are high quality not so much how often) then the group votes on whether they get an invite. Sounds a bit elitist when I say it like that but I hope you get my gist lol!
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Thanks for the shout out bud.
I think perhaps I should state that the consistency badge is one of the few that I actually like!
Yes it could encourage half-baked articles, you are correct (in fact I think it did result in me doing a "quick post" one week to continue the streak, which certainly adds validity to what you are saying!).
However consistency in writing is a massive win if you are new to writing and even if one of my contributions was not great it did encourage me to write when I might not have felt like it and subsequently enjoy writing the article!
As with anything it is a double edged sword!
As one of the people who loves DEV but will also criticise anything I think they are not doing correctly, I would also say that things seem to be improving, you do get the odd days where the feed looks like something from "the spam societies guide to spamming" but overall I think it is certainly on the right trajectory (the feed feels better now than 6 months ago and fewer "10 VS Code plugins that you must use" type posts seem to get into the top of the week position etc.).
I think the key to a good experience on DEV is to follow the people who write good content, whenever I see a notification from you or @afif, @alvaromontoro, @thormeier, @dailydevtips1 etc. I know I am going to enjoy it. (this is far from an exhaustive list of people who's articles I like!)
I do not envy the DEV team, trying to make a feed that rewards quality over pandering listicles is very difficult!
For example you said about the tags system, but that gets abused (add #javascript, #beginners and guarantee to get views!), manual moderation is linked to company biases so that becomes difficult to get right (if everyone in the company loves Rust for example then more Rust articles will fill the feed if manual intervention takes place) etc.
There are no great solutions, only better ones as every system can be gamed and is a victim of "give the people what they want to see", and a lot of people want to see listicles and click on clickbait titles (as you know I always walk a fine line where I make something appear clickbait but then (hopefully) deliver!).
It saddens me that authors like @samuelfaure don't like the platform anymore, I do understand, but at the same time I think all of the alternatives have similar issues and at least the DEV team appear to care a lot (even when I "butt heads" with them they are still passionate about their product and seem to care about quality)!
I think the key might be something I was thinking about for a while, which is to hand pick authors to form a "power team" of super high quality content and put them all together on a site. I own a2z.dev which would be an awesome domain for varied writers, so who knows, maybe we just all band together!
Anyway, I have gone off track, lots of food for thought, I will round up by saying it is a thought provoking and well written article and thank you! ❤🦄
Tags are more flexible than categories or topics of classic bulletin board discussion forums like daniweb, reddit, or quora, none of which I like to use. Probably I wouldn't really like Usenet (aka newsgroups) anymore as well. DEV offers discussion and inspiration without the visual ugliness of bulletin boards but still on a higher technical level than medium, tealfeed etc.
The hand picked authors idea seems appealing, but how are those biased who are supposed to pick? This might lead to a similar "always the same" feeling that some conferences already suffer, and once we start to focus on the power team blog, who would still follow and engage with newcomers on DEV to recognize when some of the listicle noobs have evolved to become authors we might want to feature?
To get “fresh blood” into the group I would suggest that as the authors stumble across great articles they explore someone’s other work. If they consistently produce high quality articles (I mean majority are high quality not so much how often) then the group votes on whether they get an invite. Sounds a bit elitist when I say it like that but I hope you get my gist lol!