This discussion reminds me of StackOverflow. There have been many discussions on StackOverflow meta about the dilemma how to prevent good content getting drowned in low-quality (or even factually wrong) contributions.
Their approach, an attempted meritocracy with upvotes, downvotes and a lot of beginner content getting deleted (too) quickly, seems to have several downsides: A gatekeeping mindset that discourages not only beginners but also advanced users making an effort to help beginners, reputation seekers that try to trick the algorithms instead of actually creating value, but maybe the worst disadvantage to me: They still don't succeed in prioritizing high quality content.
StackOverflow, despite all of its efforts to focus on high quality content, is full of outdated, irrelevant, misleading, and even factually false advice and code snippets, making it more of a museum of jQuery code than a go-to resource for getting things done in 2021. (Of course I am deliberately exaggerating to make a point.)
dev.to on the other hand, is one of the most open and welcoming online community for developers and programmers I have seen so far. I have found a lot of information, inspiration, disussion, as well as some entertaining fun stuff to read on dev.to. This is exactly what I love about this platform!
But still ... I keep seeing loads of articles that are either irrelevant to me personally (the mentioned beginners seeking discussion with fellow beginners, tutorials directed at beginners, and the overrepresentation of full-stack JavaScript and React) or spammy, excluding, gatekeeping and misleading (like "16 node modules EVERY developer MUST know in 2022") giving dangerous advice contrary to established consensus in the world of experienced developers, discussed over decades in mailing lists, issues trackers, conferences, books, and on Wikipedia.
I don't want to prevent innovation and thinking outside of the box, but I fear that spam and bad advice by intermediate developers, especially when they act like an authoritative source in their few lines of profile description, can confuse beginners and also harm dev.to's reputation altogether (for fellow developers, but also in the long run, for people making decisions how to prioritize trustworthy sources in search engine results). That that kind of content is annoying me personally should be the least of our worries.
As a personal consequence, I have joined many discussions (on dev.to, and also on StackOverflow meta), followed and liked developers that provide good work (including beginners that didn't show me anything I didn't know so far), but I have also started blocking people (on dev.to and twitter) and downvoting content (on StackOverflow).
I doubt that we could, or even should, try to establish a pseudo-meritocracy like StackOverflow. Maybe dev.to could change their metrics and algorithms. We can give likes, unicorns, bookmarks, we can report, block, or follow, and there are badges to reward achievements. Currently, most dev.to badges seem to reward quantity. For how long have I been a member, and how long do I manage to make a streak of continuous publishing every week.
Somehow, dev.to should rather reward quality, or stop rewarding quantity. Likewise, the number of likes does not indicate high quality. Maybe it doesn't even indicate popularity, I don't know how many people even have a dev.to login and bother to like something they read.
Filters could also be useful. There are hashtags like #beginners and topical hashtags like #javascript. Maybe dev.to could add a feedback option to suggest adding or removing hashtags for a post. Then there could be landingpages promoting the tags (there probably are, but I never used them) and maybe we could add filters so that an experienced PHP developer can opt not to see beginner JavaScript content in their feed.
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This discussion reminds me of StackOverflow. There have been many discussions on StackOverflow meta about the dilemma how to prevent good content getting drowned in low-quality (or even factually wrong) contributions.
Their approach, an attempted meritocracy with upvotes, downvotes and a lot of beginner content getting deleted (too) quickly, seems to have several downsides: A gatekeeping mindset that discourages not only beginners but also advanced users making an effort to help beginners, reputation seekers that try to trick the algorithms instead of actually creating value, but maybe the worst disadvantage to me: They still don't succeed in prioritizing high quality content.
StackOverflow, despite all of its efforts to focus on high quality content, is full of outdated, irrelevant, misleading, and even factually false advice and code snippets, making it more of a museum of jQuery code than a go-to resource for getting things done in 2021. (Of course I am deliberately exaggerating to make a point.)
dev.to on the other hand, is one of the most open and welcoming online community for developers and programmers I have seen so far. I have found a lot of information, inspiration, disussion, as well as some entertaining fun stuff to read on dev.to. This is exactly what I love about this platform!
But still ... I keep seeing loads of articles that are either irrelevant to me personally (the mentioned beginners seeking discussion with fellow beginners, tutorials directed at beginners, and the overrepresentation of full-stack JavaScript and React) or spammy, excluding, gatekeeping and misleading (like "16 node modules EVERY developer MUST know in 2022") giving dangerous advice contrary to established consensus in the world of experienced developers, discussed over decades in mailing lists, issues trackers, conferences, books, and on Wikipedia.
I don't want to prevent innovation and thinking outside of the box, but I fear that spam and bad advice by intermediate developers, especially when they act like an authoritative source in their few lines of profile description, can confuse beginners and also harm dev.to's reputation altogether (for fellow developers, but also in the long run, for people making decisions how to prioritize trustworthy sources in search engine results). That that kind of content is annoying me personally should be the least of our worries.
As a personal consequence, I have joined many discussions (on dev.to, and also on StackOverflow meta), followed and liked developers that provide good work (including beginners that didn't show me anything I didn't know so far), but I have also started blocking people (on dev.to and twitter) and downvoting content (on StackOverflow).
I doubt that we could, or even should, try to establish a pseudo-meritocracy like StackOverflow. Maybe dev.to could change their metrics and algorithms. We can give likes, unicorns, bookmarks, we can report, block, or follow, and there are badges to reward achievements. Currently, most dev.to badges seem to reward quantity. For how long have I been a member, and how long do I manage to make a streak of continuous publishing every week.
Somehow, dev.to should rather reward quality, or stop rewarding quantity. Likewise, the number of likes does not indicate high quality. Maybe it doesn't even indicate popularity, I don't know how many people even have a dev.to login and bother to like something they read.
Filters could also be useful. There are hashtags like
#beginnersand topical hashtags like#javascript. Maybe dev.to could add a feedback option to suggest adding or removing hashtags for a post. Then there could be landingpages promoting the tags (there probably are, but I never used them) and maybe we could add filters so that an experienced PHP developer can opt not to see beginner JavaScript content in their feed.