I'm a friendly, non-dev, cisgender guy from NC who enjoys playing music/making noise, hiking, eating veggies, and hanging out with my best friend/wife + our 3 kitties + 1 greyhound.
It's totally valid to bring up these concerns, but I really hope (and think) we're getting better as time goes on, not worse! The truth is, we're always working to improve our methods and tools for fighting spam and welcoming new members.
Just to show ya what I mean, here's a few examples...
Looking at #meta, you'll see some recent work went into giving authors a way to hide comments — a user safety feature. We're also currently looking into ways that we might better use text classification tools to proactively block spam in its tracks. Aside from these recent moves, we've got a number of issues floating around in our repo related to fighting abuse and mod experience that are in the works. It's all part of a continuous effort to make the site better organized, friendlier, and easier to moderate.
Which speaking of, we have a seriously awesome team of volunteer mods that I can't thank enough for their continued efforts. I think it can be tough to clearly see their effect on the site because the nature of their work is often behind-the-scenes. The thing about flagging spam and reorganizing posts by tags is that when it's working well, it's kind of invisible, but, it's definitely having a major effect. We honestly wouldn't be able to fight spammers as effectively as we have if it weren't for the mods.
30+ years of tech, retired from an identity intelligence company, now part-time with an insurance broker.
Dev community mod - mostly light gardening & weeding out spam :)
It's totally valid to bring up these concerns, but I really hope (and think) we're getting better as time goes on, not worse! The truth is, we're always working to improve our methods and tools for fighting spam and welcoming new members.
Just to show ya what I mean, here's a few examples...
Looking at #meta, you'll see some recent work went into giving authors a way to hide comments — a user safety feature. We're also currently looking into ways that we might better use text classification tools to proactively block spam in its tracks. Aside from these recent moves, we've got a number of issues floating around in our repo related to fighting abuse and mod experience that are in the works. It's all part of a continuous effort to make the site better organized, friendlier, and easier to moderate.
Which speaking of, we have a seriously awesome team of volunteer mods that I can't thank enough for their continued efforts. I think it can be tough to clearly see their effect on the site because the nature of their work is often behind-the-scenes. The thing about flagging spam and reorganizing posts by tags is that when it's working well, it's kind of invisible, but, it's definitely having a major effect. We honestly wouldn't be able to fight spammers as effectively as we have if it weren't for the mods.
Thanks Michael, I appreciate the reply and pointers to ongoing efforts to stick with the stated purpose and community spirit of dev.to as we grow :)