Recently, many meta discussions mock and condemn content trends on DEV and everywhere else. I already regret recently writing about online community demise and why DEV is different (at least a little bit, I hope), as the little bit seems to get smaller.
DEV's setting to hide tags, isn't working well anymore, if it ever did. Or it does, but only as a negative following priority. When there is too much spam, slop and fad shitposting, there's not much left to prioritize against.
My recommendations, sidebar, trends, discussions, and, not much of a surprise, the latest recent posts feed is full of crap, although I have already put #codingwithai, #claudecode, #cryptocurrency and #ai and several other hype hashtags on my hiding list.
This is how DEV typically presents itself to me recently when I open the front page: AI and trope titles.
The trends have changed. No more listicles, no more emoji overload, instead, five out of ten posts contain an em dash character, that long hyphen, hard to find on international developer keyboards, popular with American scholars—and with AI chatbots.
"Here is what I learned"
Other telltale signs that smell of sloppy writing assistance: "here is what I learned". Intended to signal authenticity, they have become red flags for the opposite, at least in most cases. The current year, 2026 right now, is one of the few evergreen attempts that might be legitimate, but adds negative points to my gut feeling heuristics. Similarly, I couldn't care less about the best dentists in Jaipur or posts in a language that I can't even read.
Maybe DEV and their productive AI community can vibe-code a spam filter that actually works? I will check back in a few weeks and see if things improved.
What I learned in the past years, writing and ranting on DEV, devrant, blogs and forums about work culture and society is that a single voice rarely changes anything, unless amplified or already popular. I'm far from being an influencer, despite being recommended every now and then.
I'm really getting bored about AI art and vibe coding discussions and how we're getting or not getting replaced by AI as developers. Maybe I should have chosen a different career path and become a physical therapist. I might have contributed more value to society and spared myself our industry's self-absorbed intellectual overhead that usually leads nowhere, or at least nowhere good. I will not digress into political topics here, although it's hard not to when, apart from some medical advancements, technological progress has failed to solve any of humanity's most important problems so far.
Write-only
I might just treat DEV like LinkedIn and medium, as a write-only platform to dump my marketing content. I really hope that's not where DEV is going.
I will keep sharing some of my thoughts and practical takeaways anyway. But reading and scrolling social media is no fun anymore.
Top comments (13)
my personal approach is following people who write good stuff and just check notifications in a while. the best way to find good authors is check top 7 featured posts every week :)
marketing content for me is fine as long as it provides value & not written by AI lol
Have you tried building a custom chrome extension to filter page content? I could see that potentially working. Also, I try to remember thar I can click the following tab. Usually I find more interesting content in there. Most of the AI stuff is in the 'discover'. I generally do not follow people right away that are new members with a bunch of "amazing posts" I let it brew for a bit to sniff the ai out before I hit follow.
I have built a chrome extension to assist my writing, although it's currently focused on Substack, not DEV. I guess at a certain point, we should just shift our focus from mostly reading to mostly writing and, otherwise, just do our work an keep quiet.
If anyone wants anything more from me, they can pay me to do so.
I can both understand and feel the frustration here. I think its important to note here that AI will only learn what its trained on. If no one is creating new ways of doing things, well that leaves the future of programming in the mud. Actually, I believe that one thing leaning heavily on AI does for developers,(hypothesis) is make all those new original ideas shine even brighter. Like oooooh! I haven't seen that before. Makes you special, original, and creative amongst vibers. AI doesn't really have that. Perhaps to be a programmer isnt enough, but perhaps an artisinal code pioneer? One can try right? 👾
Hm I don't know - for me the amount of spam is drastically less than it was 1 or 2 years ago ...
Yes, there's quite a lot of content about AI (coding tools, agents, etc), but most of it is pretty well-written and reasonably interesting - and even though I'm not a big AI Coding aficionado yet, I do value keeping up to date with the trends & the times ...
Can't say that I always understand the details when people go deep on agents and MCP and RAG and whatnot - but sometimes I have the idea that I learned something after reading an article, and there are often interesting discussions in the comments section ...
If you genuinely "hate the guts" of AI, then it's admittedly not a great time to be alive ;-) - but personally I prefer those articles over the inane "listicles" which dominated previously - I'm happy that we largely got rid of those!
I'm curious though: you made it pretty clear what kind of content you're not interested in - but what is the kind of content that you do want to see? Just asking for my curiosity ...
You must be right. I remember discussions like "you can't get a voice in here anymore" around 2022 or 2023. The Web3 Crypto NFT Bored Ape are was annoying, but AI in its current form is dangerous on another level. @wynandpieters' article We've Seen This Movie Before gets right to the point. So yes, maybe we should really hate the fad this time.
I agree that the amount of AI content and its "dominance" gets a bit too much sometimes - but, there are often quite interesting discussions, check out the comments section on some AI articles and you'll see what I mean ...
What I like most are the more conceptual articles and discussions, revolving around development processes and architecture etc - often these discussions revolve around NOT using AI in some scenarios, or about reducing its risks - I think that should appeal to you ...
"contain an em dash character, that long hyphen, hard to find on international developer keyboards, popular with American scholars—and with AI chatbots." - lol, this article also has this hyphen. Was this done on purpose or... xD
on purpose or... xD ... or both—😆
Back in the time of listicles I drafted a post about a "quality circle".
The idea is basically peer-reviewed articles - inspired by peer-reviews in academia.
I never got to the actual rules, but once you have a certain reputation, you may propose an article for review. If reviewers (people with a certain reputation), accept it, it gets a tag or badge or whatever, which says: this article was written by a human and adds value to this community.
What do you think about this?
Wouldn't that be what soft moderation by trusted users is for? From my understanding, content that's considered "low quality" (for whatever reason) and is flagged as such should not surface as much, if the soft moderation worked the way it was intended, no? Given, what's considered "low quality" is based on rules of thumb only, but it would at least be something. Or are you talking about a new platform or mechanism entirely?
Yes, this would be a new feature.
The difference is, that right now a new article is considered neutral and can be marked as low-quality. But someone has to do this job for theoretically all publshed articles.
With this approach, articles can be marked as high-quality.
Not by anyone, but by people who are experts in the field.
Unlike Likes or Comments, this would allow not-so-active authors get the readers attention, because the article is recommended by experts.
Also anyone can submit an article for review, but only once per day or week and with a certain reputation.
Slop for me in some cases is not the demon, there could be really curated information out there, quality still matters in any scenario