If you’ve watched even one Fireship video in the past 3 months, you probably know what Daily.dev is. If you don’t, it’s pretty simple. Daily.dev functions as a sort of “hub for crossposting” – a really nice idea, actually. No one is forced to use a certain platform, and writers have the potential to market to a much larger audience.
I have a few complaints about the site though. Most of them are personal though, so I won’t spend that much time on them. Here’s a short list: AI generated summaries, “meh” customization options, and lots of organizations posting slop content that I don’t really care for (this content is also super hard to get out of your feed for some reason). Those are just my opinions though.
However, there is one “complaint” I have that I think everyone should be worried about.
If you haven’t visited app.daily.dev in recent weeks, you might notice something a little bit different on your return. Below the title of each article, there’s occasionally a little yellow shield.
This yellow shield signifies that something on Daily.dev’s end (likely some sort of machine learning model – I’m not completely sure to be frank, as this isn’t my area of expertise) has determined that the title in question is clickbait.
A bad look for Daily.dev
That in itself isn’t a great look for Daily.dev (but wait, we haven’t even gotten to the worst part!). This is absolutely something that could negatively affect an author, and thus, it’s a great way for bias to seep in. What if English is an author’s second language, and because of that, a lot of their titles sound a bit clunky to people who have spoken English their entire life? Their “clickbait” detection system might incorrectly flag that post, thus punishing an author simply because their English isn’t as good as others.
Some possible issues
What if an author has a specific naming or writing style that differs from whatever this detection system prefers? If this detection system is some sort of machine learning model, what if, over time, it “learns” (again, not sure if that’s the correct term or thought process here) to flag listicles more than it does any other kind of article. I’m not the biggest fan of listicles, but there’s nothing against it in Daily.dev’s rules, thus any listicle should have the same chance of success as any other type of post. Again, this is why I think that this is something everyone should be worried about.
And by the way, yes, this has already incorrectly flagged quite a few posts. Here’s an example of one:
And here’s the post itself. I think we can all agree that this clickbait detection system is completely inaccurate.
The worst part
So what’s the worst part? Well, if you pay 💵8.99 USD/month, Daily.dev will automatically change any title flagged as clickbait. So now we have a system that incorrectly flags content, and then automatically changes it without the author’s permission.
This is a wonderful example of extremely unethical behavior as well as developers that have never considered the side effects or potential bias of their software. I mean, c’mon. This is something that I learned in all 4 of the CS classes that I’ve taken – in highschool. I realize that my experience isn’t universal, but considering bias and side effects should really be a fundamental skill as a software developer.
On a quick side tangent: Yes, I’m sure that somewhere along the onboarding process, I probably checked a box that said “Daily.dev, you can do whatever you want with my writing”. This doesn’t make what they’re doing any less unethical though.
What should you do?
This is really up to you. I likely won’t post content to Daily.dev anymore (note the disclaimer at the bottom), as I don’t want to support this behavior. I wouldn’t blame someone for staying on Daily.dev though. As I said at the beginning of this article, they allow you to market to a much wider audience, thus increasing your overall viewership, likes, followers, etc. But if biased software is what allows me to get a few more views, I refuse to be a part of it.
If you have any ideas or opinions to share, please do! I'd love to hear them.
Disclaimer: I will post this (and only this) article on Daily.dev. Maybe one of the administrators will see it and consider the issues with their clickbait detection system.
P.S: If you’d like another place to post your content that specifically doesn’t allow AI generated content, try out my content creation platform for developers, byeAI. Crossposting will be released soon!
Top comments (15)
Your post prompted me to go looking for this, and I'm not seeing this icon even on the article Angular article provided as an example. Is there a setting or configuration for this?
Also, I do not see any place that daily.dev accepts money. Can you provide more details about the $8.99/month feature you mention?
Could it be that it's only being rolled out to certain geographical regions? If you go to the top of your feed, click on feed settings, then click on "AI Superpowers", you'll see it.
There's also an "upgrade to plus" button there.
Thanks for the detail. No Clickbait Shield or Plus option for me. A/B Testing is always exciting.
We're gradually rolling it out indeed
Haven’t seen that clickbait detection before, regardless I never really liked the UI/UX. It feels a bit like a maze to navigate. 😅🫣
Would love to do better, do let me know how we can improve
For sure, and don’t get me wrong I think the whole idea of daily.dev is great. And the fact that you can change layout (just realized) might win me over. 🙂
That's great to hear!
Yeah, agreed. It feels like Youtube, but much more busy (in terms of UI/UX).
@kurealnum I appreciate the feedback and understand your point of view, but let me try to shed some light on this feature. It's not a secret that today's algorithms optimize CTR (click through ratio) which turns creators into a clickbait machine. They try to come up with a title so intriguing that the consumer can't resist but to click it. These titles never live up to their promise and don't provide much info about the content itself. It has nothing to do with English being first language or not (as you can probably tell English isn't my first language as well).
Just like any other algorithm, there's still work to do and there are some false positives but currently we don't penalize posts with this mark just replace their titles for Plus users, so there's very little damage if any.
Sidenote: personally I think clickbait is the worst thing that happened due to feed algorithms. Creators fight over your attention any way they can. We try to do things differently in daily.dev
In reference to what I said about bias, I mean to refer to accidental bias. I know that no one would intend to punish users whose first language isn't English, but that doesn't mean that bias couldn't be introduced into a system.
Additionally, I realize that Daily.dev is not intending to penalize posts. However I think it's reasonable to assume that users will, over time, start to negatively associate a yellow shield icon with posts. In other words, yellow shield icons will cause posts that have been incorrectly flagged to be indirectly penalized.
One last thing: changing a user's own work, even if it's something as simple as a title, is just wrong. Even if Daily.dev isn't penalizing posts and the algorithm used to detect clickbait-y titles has no bias or false positives, changing someone else's work without their permission is simply unethical. If the post is so bad that it warrants changing a user's own work, it should just be removed. Or at the very least, Daily.dev should let user's opt out of it (which, admittedly, would kinda ruin the purpose of it).
I wish you the best of luck with Daily.dev though! It's cool to see y'alls ads on Fireship every now and then.
Any ML/AI system can introduce bias regardless of this specific feature. Our job as engineers is to ensure that it doesn't.
Our feed's primary purpose is to help the content consumer decide what post they'd like to read or watch. If some creators try to trick consumers into clicking, I see them as unethical, and we fix this by giving every post an equal chance. I strongly agree that we change someone's work, if someone decides to read the post they'll see the original content we never touch. We just decide what's the best way to represent it within our feed so the consumer can make an educated decision.
I have my own platform as well, and I try and grow it constantly. But... yeah, nothing will ever beat the newest/flashiest thing.
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