First and foremost, I love that there is so much beginner-friendly content on dev! I would have dreamed of such articles at the time I began to program.
At the same time I know there is the level system. However, I still think it would be good for all of use, if there would also be some more skill-level oriented tags, such intermediate, advanced or expert.
It would make it much easier for advanced users to find articles that are much more challenging. What do you people think?
Top comments (10)
Not a bad idea!
I think it totally makes sense for folks writing more advanced content to use those tags. We've not tried to encourage use of the #expert, #advanced, or #intermediate tags, but we could potentially do so and possibly recruit a tag moderator to help us use the tag. Will consider this!
Do you, by any chance, know how the expertise system currently decides which articles to show? I'm geniunly interested. The explanation says it is a "gentle" indicator, but perhaps that shouldn't be as gentle? Having extra tags feels redundant to me if the current dedicated system doesn't live up to people's expectations already.
This will become a bit less gentle over time, as we are able to make sure it's as useful as possible. It's an ongoing balance, but definitely feel that we need to keep leaning in on this system to reach the ideal place, vs "falling back" on the tags.
One current shortcoming of the system is that we technically let the author themselves label their own post, but it's very user-unfriendly and a bit buried. Improving that UX is going to go a long way — and have a very similar impact to tagging itself — and that will be fixed soon.
Are we talking machine learning here? :D The system actually sounds a lot like a use case for a basic ML model that would analyse the user's read articles (perhaps even if they interacted with it) and would try to decide for each article if the user would read it based on the specified level.
I wasn't, but that is definitely in the cards as a component as things evolve. Any human data we collect would eventually make an ML model more effective, but I don't think we're quite there yet to make the leap.
Hey Pascal,
That's a really great question! I'm going to see if I can tag in a technical team member who can help explain how exactly this works...
And good point that having tags & an experience level system feels redundant. I agree with you and I'm hopeful that we can lean more into the experience level system over tags for this. To be clear, I'm second guessing the idea of using experience level tags...
Anywho, let me find somebody to help us dig into how this currently works!
One thing we could potentially do is move the experience level to 1 for any post that is tagged as beginner. This would help to clean up the experience level for all those posts that we have tagged as beginner but not ranked via experience level.
You can tag a post with anything you want. You can even follow them. So it is mostly a matter of getting people to use those tags where relevant. Follow the links in @michaeltharrington comment. #expert has only been used twice in 2022. But the other 2 seem to be used at least occasionally, about once or twice per month or so.
Yes, we can use any tags we want but they are not moderated and are also not suggested by autocompletion. This makes already a difference in choosing tags.
I just meant that the infrastructure for it exists, and that some do use them, so that it is probably at least partially a matter of buy in. And maybe encouragement, such as your post.