I know, I know, many people have talked about, and hated on listicles here on DEV many times.
But to be completely honest, they're some of the most annoying and un-creative articles you can come across. Most of them are useless or offer very little value apart from a collection of X or Y things, or are just cheap marketing. And you can't escape them it seems... They're also bad for beginners, making them feel like they MUST read them in order to progress as developers. And that's not good.
Listicles are one of the reasons I left DEV for half a year or so. And after coming back it seems it's even worse than before. Maybe the rise of AI is making it even easier to create them.
I really like this platform. I've been an active member of DEV for many years, have posted numerous articles and have consumed many more. I've read some of the best articles here, and engaged in some of the most interesting discussions and conversations.
And i know I'm not the only one that dislikes listicles, or even stopped using DEV because of them. This makes me sad, because great articles get lost between all the listicles.
But I think it could be fixed quite simply.
I want to bring up a possible solution to the table, which might've been already suggested, but in case it hasn't, here it is.
The idea is not to prevent creating listicles, but a way for people who dislike them to hide them from their feed. People who want to see them, can. People who want to create them, can. And people who don't want to see them, can.
The idea is to "force" listicles to have a tag listicle or something like that. So that we can hide it from the feed like we hide any other tag.
Forcing it could be done by the guidelines and mods I guess...
Or maybe it can be algorithmically done in code or using AI 🤷
Just a little idea!
Top comments (23)
What if instead of tagging, it could be a muted words list sorta thing so it's handled by the user rather than the site?
It could also look inside an article's content because for a time Dev was filled with american politics because of a certain orange man and considering what may happen in the future I would love to avoid any of that 😮💨 and creating a tag for this is a bit of an overkill.
Muted words/phrases would help with this and we could even do regex style stuff for those listicles and the like.
Just proposing another little idea :3
That's also a good idea!
Like many, many platforms before it, DEV is a victim of it's own success, attracting poor quality content as it has become an ever larger centralised watering hole. I have yet to see any centralised platform that has been able to significantly impact this issue through automation, as all such automation will be gameable in some way - it's an arms race in which the platform will always lose. What DEV operational teams are doing is trying to leverage the large number of well-intentioned people who come here to help police the platform, through the trusted membership and moderator recruitment programs. This, along with tag filtering /may/ provide enough protection to keep things upright.
By contrast, a federated platform (eg: Mastodon, Peertube) already comes with a significant number of motivated moderators as they are operating their own part of the whole - this is resulting (IME) in a patchy, but more stable ecosystem with an 'immune system' that can react quickly, locally and adapts well to unwanted content attempts.
Lots more on content moderation from Cory Doctorow for interested folks!: pluralistic.net/2022/03/12/move-sl...
Strong agree. Tagging articles with
listiclewould make it easier for this, too. I’d also add a flag for AI generated content. If someone uses AI to produce an article, they should disclose it and share what they used. AI isn’t intrinsically bad, but plagiarism is.That's already a thing in the guidelines. But people try to not add the tag, as not many people want to read AI generated articles
Yeah, trusted members should be able to add the tag involuntarily then. If someone doesn’t want to work with us to build a healthy community, I don’t mind if they move on somewhere else.
There are already guidelines like this for AI generated content on the site. But, since adding such a tag to your post will pretty much guarantee a much lower viewership and effectively stigmatise your 'work' - almost no-one does... rendering the guidelines effectively useless.
For something like this to work, these tags need to be applied automatically, and not be removable. Some form of AI could probably be used to select candidate posts for the tags, but there would likely need to be human oversight to prevent false positives. The results of this oversight could be fed back into the model(s) to improve detection rates.
We desperately need something like this to save Dev from the onslaught of low quality listicles, AI generated SEO content, ChatGPT copy pastes etc. that it has seen over the last couple of years. This used to be a really good site. Sigh
Trusted members could also be given a button to apply the tag in a way that cannot be removed. I’d be willing to spend a couple minutes every day tagging listicles.
That's a good idea! I'd also be willing to do that.
Not all listicles are bad. A few are good, but many are miserable and dangerously misleading. Maybe forem should add a dislike/downvote button or increase the weight of "low quality" moderation signals against likes and interactions.
I've come across very few decent ones, but I'm sure good ones exist somewhere 😂
I think the vast majority are bad. The low quality button has too low lead time, and by time it has any impact the clout has already been chased or achieved.
I also think folks who only post listicles should have to buy ad space. Promoting one’s product or project by spamming us all with listicles should at least support the platform financially.
Yes, please. I would like to hide listicles. I don’t think they add much value, and frequently come across as AI-generated clout-chasing.
I have also considered finding another community, as this one seems to be so full of listicles. I don’t want to tell people that they can’t post something they themselves authored, but I have found that an awful lot of the listicles are copied and pasted or AI-generated. It’s just not good content and I’m weary of weeding through it.
I totally understand. I also considered looking for something else, but I still like dev a lot. I've also tried a few alternatives and I think it's one of the best ones if not the best one. Let's hope the team can find a way to fix this, as it's something that bother a lot of people.
Oh please yes....
Yes, they should. So annoying sometimes, and it would be nice to filter them!
Agreed. It would be nice if we could include it in an RSS feed as well
(maybe embedded with Tag: .. in the description) as that is the primary way I read dev.to.
My idea is it should cost a dollar to create a post. That’s it, that’s the whole idea.
If people have to pay a dollar to post, that will drive away the vast majority of the backlink spammers, ChatGPT copy-pasters, and low-effort marketing content.
Any listicles left after that will probably be of higher quality.
That's true, but unfortunately it would also drive away people who are honestly trying to post.
Can you please expand a bit on what do you mean by "listicles"? Should I believe you don't meant all the listicles?
Top 10 libraries every developer must know to be god...
These 10 sites will make you 7 figures...
All those kinds of articles.
What about stuff like "30 React Interview Questions" or "17 JS tips and tricks"?
Yup same thing, any articles that are just a list of things. Listicles is the combination of the words list and article.