I've been a professional C, Perl, PHP and Python developer.
I'm an ex-sysadmin from the late 20th century.
These days I do more Javascript and CSS and whatnot, and promote UX and accessibility.
I wonder how much of this is down to those people being new and thinking that their post hasn't been seen before?
Perhaps we could encourage people to post, but also encourage them to check whether it's novel enough. Something like making posting two-stages, the first where you enter a title and tags, and the second where you enter the post content OR are presented with a list of similar existing posts and given the option of "boosting" or "promoting" them somehow.
If there was a "related articles" panel under every post and someone posted "10 git commands you need to know!" (not picking on anyone here) and the related articles were five more posts with the exact same title, what would that do to how the site is perceived?
If visitors search and find 100 matches, how will they choose which one to read? DEV uses a scoring system for search results but the danger is that it becomes a cult of personality where a few people get views for some reason and the rest of their posts get more attention regardless of the quality. That's something that's happened on plenty of other websites.
This is like the death of the author; the ideal would be for each post to be weighed on its own merit. I'm just not sure it's a problem with a solution.
Firstly, noting your job, thanks for taking the time to actively engage.
Perhaps we could encourage people to post, but also encourage them to check whether it's novel enough.
I theorise that it'd be fairly simple for a "plagiarism check" to be added as the user clicks "Post" - scan articles already on Dev, how similar is this to something someone else has posted - then ask the "are you sure you want to post this?"
But maybe that might dissuade some newer users from posting, when they should be allowed to express their opinion on any given topic.
DEV uses a scoring system for search results but the danger is that it becomes a cult of personality where a few people get views for some reason and the rest of their posts get more attention regardless of the quality.
Maybe a way forwards on that would be to give users more control over the the content they see. I'm sure the scoring system has multiple parameters, so maybe it would be beneficial to leverage that, for example, allowing me to define my "acceptable level" for each metric (or some subset thereof) that builds the overall score, things below that level I don't see, regardless of the overall score (which presumably, dictates vertical ranking).
Lastly, noting my job, I don't currently believe the PV of this issue is high enough to warrant actively working on it, but suggest it be monitored for changes in P nonetheless (and it's apparent that it is being monitored). ;)
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We're a place where coders share, stay up-to-date and grow their careers.
I wonder how much of this is down to those people being new and thinking that their post hasn't been seen before?
Perhaps we could encourage people to post, but also encourage them to check whether it's novel enough. Something like making posting two-stages, the first where you enter a title and tags, and the second where you enter the post content OR are presented with a list of similar existing posts and given the option of "boosting" or "promoting" them somehow.
If there was a "related articles" panel under every post and someone posted "10 git commands you need to know!" (not picking on anyone here) and the related articles were five more posts with the exact same title, what would that do to how the site is perceived?
If visitors search and find 100 matches, how will they choose which one to read? DEV uses a scoring system for search results but the danger is that it becomes a cult of personality where a few people get views for some reason and the rest of their posts get more attention regardless of the quality. That's something that's happened on plenty of other websites.
This is like the death of the author; the ideal would be for each post to be weighed on its own merit. I'm just not sure it's a problem with a solution.
Firstly, noting your job, thanks for taking the time to actively engage.
I theorise that it'd be fairly simple for a "plagiarism check" to be added as the user clicks "Post" - scan articles already on Dev, how similar is this to something someone else has posted - then ask the "are you sure you want to post this?"
But maybe that might dissuade some newer users from posting, when they should be allowed to express their opinion on any given topic.
Maybe a way forwards on that would be to give users more control over the the content they see. I'm sure the scoring system has multiple parameters, so maybe it would be beneficial to leverage that, for example, allowing me to define my "acceptable level" for each metric (or some subset thereof) that builds the overall score, things below that level I don't see, regardless of the overall score (which presumably, dictates vertical ranking).
Lastly, noting my job, I don't currently believe the PV of this issue is high enough to warrant actively working on it, but suggest it be monitored for changes in P nonetheless (and it's apparent that it is being monitored). ;)