Here's a bit of a rant, from thoughts over the last month or so.
I am getting worn down by the repetition of blog topics, especially on dev.to. Th...
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When I first started writing [cough] years ago, I looked at popular blogs and articles and noticed there were Top 10 lists everywhere, so I emulated them until I got comfortable writing my own pieces. Of course, "Top x" lists never went away, but they dissipated as more people wrote informed articles or personal thoughts on a particular topic. Then, at the top of 2020, Vulture posted an article where they ranked every Oscar movie:
vulture.com/article/best-oscar-win...
Pretty quickly, it seemed like all the entertainment blogs started emulating Vulture's newfound love of the listicle. Then lockdowns started, where the "49 [not 50] most anticipated shows coming to Netflix" and the "25 shows you must binge before they disappear from Amazon Prime" became super popular with consumers hungry for content.
Just as millions decided to learn how to make sourdough, countless others decided to learn to code, or their employer decided to jump feet first into more modern software development tools, frameworks, web services, eschewing the concept that everything they developed had to be in SharePoint, C#, or SQL Server.
I witnessed this phenomenon as many of my clients I would refer to as "old school". Suddenly they began adopting Git, Kubernetes, and other technologies that were -- and frankly still are -- a mystery to many of them. So with this massive migration, I think listicles found their way from mainstream entertainment to mainstream technology as well. I cannot tell you how many people reach out to me asking the themes and extensions I find most useful in VS Code. It gets me thinking I should write an article about how to think about themes and extensions, rather than list my top ten (I will have to put that on the to-do list).
Thinking back to my first writing, where I emulated the popular "top 10" approach to writing, I believe people are trying to grow an audience, and these are good clickable articles. Chances are the same people making these lists will be writing thoughtful articles later in their career, but with listicles having their moment, I suppose we will have to wait for it. Listicles are useful. I actually read a few recently about no-code solutions and checked them out, and it sent me down a rabbit hole to check out what people are using and what is to come. That said, if you are reading this comment and you are writing listicles only, know that sharing a personal story is what builds your career and engages people to collaborate with you. That advice comes from someone who built a career around building customers through engaging content.
I absolutely love Dev.to and Medium over other sites because people tend to share their stories. There are many great "I built this amazing app, and here is how I did it," or "How I learned to build an AI robot," or whatever the topic is. Going to the home page for a quick perusal every day seems to showcase those articles more than the listicles. In October of last year, I created a list of sites I like to visit and added them to my browser favorites. I go to the site's home page once a day/every few days, and if there is nothing of interest, I move on. The RSS feeds I used to rely upon became far too much for me to handle and kept distracting me because of the issues you document, like too many listicles. If I can recommend one thing, it is to peruse the first few top posts and move on, which is at least what works for me :-)
Okay, Unsplash images. I get it, I really do! My own website, which I wrote myself, was an exciting journey. What was not an exciting journey was to find images I can use. I have access to Adobe's Stock library, and there are so many resources out there. Unfortunately, Unsplash is way too easy, and there are no (or far less) concerns about usage rights and all the things that come with licensing images for a corporate entity. When I write a piece that I really want to call out, I do look for something special, even if on Unsplash, and I recommend others consider that approach as well. Here is an example that I am told got me lots of views simply because the image got their attention:
linkedin.com/pulse/tell-me-somethi...
Nearly every time I go to a GitHub repo, I see the same NPM package dependencies, the same boring readme files, and the same folder structure. It gets me thinking; maybe images are the same for people who put their creativity to use in other places?
Yes it sounds possible that listicles came from something outside like in entertainment.
Yes experience with tools and personal stories is what I like about the posts here. More relatable than tutorials and lists.
I like your idea of a post on how to make a good listicle without being cliché. One tip I am thinking of is to make it themed or specialized. As with any product in marketing, the audience may be smaller but appeal will be greater and it will be differentiated from the boring ones.
Such as top X extensions for React development. Or productivity. Or DevOps.
Even if there are only 3 extensions on the list, if they fit together as a toolset for a job role then they will resonate.
Maybe you can cover what a good number for a listicle is. Like maybe 20 items should be in two top 10 lists and they are logically grouped. There is some psychology I have heard before on choosing multiples of 10 or 5. Maybe going against that like 49 tells people already you're going to be unique but in familiar format.
It’s probably the same psychology stores use to price products: buy one, get two free, now only $49.99. You feel like you are investing less, but it’s exactly the point where your brain says it’s okay to spend the money.
In our case, we are just talking about where your are spending your time reading. I never thought of it that way until now.
Anywho, I’ll probably write that article when I get a chance, because it could be a fun little piece to write without being derogatory.
I actually make includes and layout files in Jekyll to help me focus on YAML data that gets turned into a listicle
github.com/MichaelCurrin/dev-resou...
YAML data github.com/MichaelCurrin/dev-resou...
Result
michaelcurrin.github.io/dev-resour...
And my blog
github.com/MichaelCurrin/coding-bl...
github.com/MichaelCurrin/coding-bl...
michaelcurrin.github.io/coding-blo...
That's a cool idea!
I discovered this podcast series.
They have a 45min interview on tech topics.
And they also list out with links all the tech in the podcast. In order.
dev.to/codenewbie/s14-e5-what-is-t...
This is great if you want to learn more about a tool or company or website. And they are in context of a personal story and career. And its hard to say spell something correctly if you only hear it in audio
Or maybe you want to scan the list to see what the podcast is about.
I totally agree, there is a lot of repetition. The one I have started getting annoyed about is the "Intro to functional programming in Javascript", which basically covers immutability and map/filter/reduce, often using emojis.
"best vscode extensions" bothers me as well. I do love vscode and I love useful extensions, I have found several good ones through those posts, but like 90% of the time all listed extensions are for javascript/webdev. Webdev in general is a huge part of dev.to. Which is a bit unfortunate for people like me who are not into webdev.
I also get bothered my excessive use of emojis and gifs. I have seen someone had this complaint in their comments as gifs being too distracting and they removed some.
I get that the tone is light rather than serious but it seems too casual or informal for technical writing.
I do like unexpected posts. Like this one saying you don't need that VS Code extension and this is how to use the builtin feature.
dev.to/robole/vs-code-you-don-t-ne...
I've been disabling or removing extensions in general as it slows down my IDE on startup and in the git pane.
Someone told me in a comment that when you edit the topics you follow on dev.to you can set negative weighting for topics. Try a low or negative value for topics like webdev or javascript
Cool thanks. It looks like it works because the tag "anti-follow" appeared next to JavaScript haha.