I love this platform. I've been hanging around there ever since Medium became shit. So while it's great to see the platform all grown-up, it's also kind of disheartening to see some (most) of the issues that plagued Medium follow along.
Here's a personal take on issues that plague Dev.to. Please be reminded as you read that this does not intend for any moral judgement, but is a single man's opinion on the origins of the issues.
Over-representation of a certain type of development
Not a big issue, but certainly an issue. It feels like this platform is centered around a certain type of developers. Precisely, the "Junior fullstack javascript developer fresh out of bootcamp".
This is not a bad thing per se, but many developers outside of this category just have very little reason to browse around here. Most posts are centered around Javascript, Node.js and React. Very little talk about the rest of the ecosystem.
It would be a net gain for everyone to appeal to a broader audience.
Lack of quality
Dev.to is not Reddit nor Hackernews. Content is not organized by "best". Which is not to say that it should. But as with any platform that becomes big enough, more and more people are posting here.
Which would not be a problem if everyone was doing its best to write great, useful, and insightful articles. Sadly, this is not what's happening.
To be clear, I'm not trying to say that inexperienced developers should not write, quite the contrary I think they definitely should.
What I'm trying to say is that writing should be motivated by mostly altruistic reasons, rather than selfish ones.
Personally, I wrote some Ruby articles because I felt like they were missing while I was learning the language. I wrote what I would have wanted to read on the internet and that did not exist yet. I wrote so people around me would have it slightly easier than I did.
Writing a good article is hard and takes time. Sadly, the front-page seems stuck with the eternal same "5 Top VSCode extensions" or yet another guide to React hooks. Were the previous guides so bad that the internet needed yet another?
The shallow and repetitive nature of the articles wouldn't be an issue, if it felt like there always was a genuine / heartfelt attempt at producing quality content. But there is none of that, because a genuine effort is rooted in altruism, and that's not why most people seem to post here.
Personal and professional branding / advertisement
And here comes the bigger issue. Every post seems to either be motivated by personal branding, or is just plain business advertisement.
I'm not even criticizing anyone here, I'm just stating the facts: I understand launching your startup and being in need of free advertisement. I really do.
But ads don't make for good content at all. And this is one of the main reasons why good content is becoming rarer and rarer here.
I'm also not criticizing the fresh-out-of-bootcamps junior devs that want to be able to distinguish themselves - the job market can be quite a bitch for juniors. We've been repeating for years that junior devs should distinguish themselves by contributing, starting a blog, sharing their knowledge, and participating in open-source projects, if they wanted to have a chance at getting a job.
But the return on investment is much better by just rehashing the same knowledge over and over again.
There seems to be a dissonance between what the writers on Dev.to want, and what Dev.to need.
What do?
So how can a website with a very low bar of entry such as this one, do its best to promote the best possible content, without becoming yet another Reddit?
Should there be some kind of human curation happening ? The newsletter is trying to achieve this, but this doesn't help with the browsing part of the experience.
Are there community-driven ways to uphold ourselves to higher standards?
I don't really have a solution. Do you?
Top comments (159)
I totally agree with you. I see a lot of great content underrated and lost behind the "200 Awesome resources that will make you the best developer" articles. I also don't understand why people love such articles too much (they get a ton of reaction immediately).
As a moderator here, I tend to mark them as "low quality" but it seems not enough. I suggest to have more manual work.
The feed should be curated and selected manually. I know there is a lot of articles each day but if each tag moderator handle a tag, it can be an easy work. It would be good to have a kind of "kick this article" button that allow us to simply remove it from the feed (while still visible on the other tabs). Of course, and to avoid any kind of abuse, such action should be tracked and some kind of notifications are sent to the team to make sure the action was legit and that article doesn't deserve to be in the feed.
Stop the automatic badges, the ones given each week to the top author (CSS, JS, react, etc). From what I noticed, it's only based on the number of reactions and since the low quality "listicles" are getting a ton they will earn that badge easily which will encourage them (and the others) to do the same to earn the badge (the gamification system). The "Top 7 posts" is a great idea because manually picking 7 good articles will encourage great content and will stop the bad gamification. All the badges should be like that IMO. Why not adding more of them, like "Top of the month", "best of the year", etc We can even have a new tab called "editor picks" where we put interesting articles hand picked by the team or the stuff.
Man, I feel you on this. And the irony is, nobody even goes through or uses those resources.
Btw, I remember your name. I've read article/stack answers of yours that have helped me quite a bit :). Thank you
Maybe there should be some kind of special category for that kind of "articles". I totally agree, that most of the "loved" articles are just poor list of link to libraries, repos etc. It has nothing to do with self development and quality. Hope it will change soon, because finding something valuable here is ridiculously hard. Regards!
There should be a mandatory #listicle tag that you can exclude if you want to!
It would be fine enough as well! :)
The only problem with manual curation is that it's subjective, however the "top articles" thing where the listicles very often get a lot of attention is ALSO subjective.
I would say that for the "top articles" post they might start de-emphasizing the listicles, and start promoting good solid content ... I just want to see more in depth "how to" articles, solid tutorials, that's what seems to be getting less and less on dev.to, or at least it's probably there but it just gets less visibility.
I prefer subjective rather than random. As an expert in a specific field (CSS in my case) I can easily identify good articles from no-sense-very-bad-useless article. I don't expect to select articles to be shown in the feed but rather have the ability to remove the bad ones.
I think they already do a good deal of manual curation, the really bad stuff doesn't make it onto the site obviously ... in case of questionable quality content maybe what they could do is indicate it by tagging/ranking, rather than removing it altogether - so, people can still view it of they want, it will just end up having a lower default "ranking" in people's streams ... I see better tagging/ranking and better (more extensive and fine-grained) filtering as the solution, or at least a large part of the solution.
not removing altogether, simply removing from the feed and still visible in the other tabs (like the latest). Also we already have a tool (as moderators) to rank some posts up or down but it's not enough against the bad posts that get a ton of reactions.
Yeah that's exactly what I meant :)
Yeah lol way too many "listicles" :-)
I think manual work can only last so long, it may be time to really work on some algorithms for the page feed to push some of the lower quality down. I don't come here as much as I used to for the same reason. I dont need {COUNT} of the best {X} resource everyday or how you can do a simple trivial task. I am all for people getting into writing but maybe there needs to be an approval, time limit, and quality posting before someone can hit the main page.
Hope to see some of great articles. Because I saw a lot of articles with many interactions or views, but they just list out some tools, extensions or projects everyone should do. As fresher, sometimes I don't know which one I should read or spend much time on instead of reading useless contents. Thank you
Thanks for expressing your perspective in a thoughtful and thought-provoking manner here, @samuelfaure!
As a DEV team member and one of this community's moderators, I'm watching this comments section keenly for suggestions on how we can keep the community inclusive and welcoming for devs of all levels and stages of their career, while continuing to foster constructive and relevant content for members who are further along their journey.
Hi Ella, and thanks for reading and listening.
To go back on my suggestion for curating, I just checked the newsletter. It seems like the 7 selected articles of the week are the ones that had the most "success" (I'm guessing, views or interactions) this week.
On the last newletter, out of 7 articles, 3 are directly JS-ecosystem oriented. A quick look at the previous newsletters show a similar trend: about half of selected articles are strictly about the JavaScript ecosystem.
The other half are more often than not very junior-oriented (such as a basic guide for git rebase. Great content, but for a very fresh junior).
The problem with curating by most successful articles is that you're creating a feedback loop where you are reinforcing this population's prevalence on the platform.
On the other hand, I wrote a few articles which I think are quite decent, quite interesting takes, and I'm very probably not the only one in that situation. The issue is those articles don't get much visibility because they're not javascript-related at all, so they don't appear in the most popular tags.
A solution I might suggest is, again, human curation. Maybe you guys at DEV can try to browse different tags and share with us every week what YOU personally liked or found interesting.
Generally, the platform needs to put the brakes on the perpetual flow of beginner-JS content and try to promote different works, both on the feed and the newsletter.
This is helpful feedback!
Currently the newsletter is actually curated by humans, so all of the advice that you have for us here can be applied to our current methods.
I know that our team tries to choose from a variety of authors and touch on a variety of topics, but totally hear ya that JS/beginner posts are getting more air time than the rest. I think part of this is likely due to the fact that there are more posts tagged with #javascript and #beginners than anything else. If you look at our top tags page you are able to see the most used tags in descending order and how many posts are published under each — it's clear that JavaScript and Beginners have loads of posts created under these topics. We need to be aware of this and remember to look to other less used tags when curating the newsletter/top 7.
In addition to @samuelfaure points out about topics not in the “most popular tags”, I would like to see an option in “My Tags” to ignore specific tags. This could help the tags I am interested in that are not popular fill my feed more than they currently do.
Please let me know if this is already and option and I have simply missed it.
Great question! There is a way to make this happen, but it's a bit difficult to discover right now so totally understood that you missed it...
If you navigate to your User Dashboard (available when clicking on your image in the top right) and click on "Following Tags" (in the lefthand sidebar), you'll be taken to this page which allows you the option to adjust the "follow weight" of your different tags. A negative follow weight is counted as an "anti-follow" meaning that the tag will show up in your feed less.
☝️ This is all described in excellent detail by @afif in the post 💡 Quick Tips: Make your DEV.TO home feed better with "Anti-follow" Tag Weightings
Fantastic, thank you @michaeltharrington and the DEV team for this functionality!
This is a pretty concrete suggestion, thanks! I'm curious to run this by not only the DEV team, but the incredible volunteer moderators who give their time and attention to helping this platform run smoothly.
Do you mind if I share this post and your suggestion with them?
Do whatever you want with it. Glad I could be of service.
Don't just put the brakes on the perpetual flow of beginner Javascript. Put the brakes on Javascript content full stop. There's hardly any variety to it which makes most of it uninteresting even to those who do Javascript, never mind those of us who don't. By all means let people write the three hundred and forty second article about how to turn text pink using Reactular, just don't promote it.
The masses of Javascript is off-putting to people who have interesting things to write about using other technologies. For a long time I didn't bother creating an account here because it was basically a Javascript fanboy site.
I might even go so far as to say don't promote anything that is wildly popular. Instead promote the interesting things lurking in the shadows. A good article that gets upvoted a hundred times will be promoted by its readers without any help.
This * a number I cannot even fathom. It's super frustrating writing a deep technical article that doesn't get promoted while drowning underneath regurgitations of popular JavaScript tutorials and top-5 lists, not to mention corporate spam.
I know I should be writing strictly for my own benefit, but I'd honestly rather just stick with my lab journal because it feels really demoralizing when stuff gets obliterated by a poor signal-to-noise ratio.
The one thing that it could be up for the platform to do would be to provide categorised suggestions (eg: top new posts in a sort of different layer categories, per language, per development type backed/frontend/ops, etc)
Beyond that, it's more of a human responsibility: there is no reason to not do personal branding with quality articles.
What about making the "level" system more relevant.
If I set my tech level to 10 I'd like to not receive any listicle, even in top posts in emails 😅
That makes some sense, but some posts are more general, i.e. you don't need knowledge is a specific stack to be able to take something from it. E.g. soft engineering topics, people topics, etc. I think a simple slider is too naive.
I am waiting to see a top 10 list of top 10 lists of vs code extensions.
You'll love my upcoming piece on "My Dog's Favourite VSCode Theme"
why your dog is using VSCode? check my article "15 New tools that your Dog will love and will change its life". You will love it! (I mean your dog will do)
Only to be topped by my article about my cat's favourite neovim setup for web dev in 2021!
This is all a bit of a grey area.
Someone's probably written a VS Code extension to highlight the top ten lists of top ten VS Code extensions in the corner of your VS Code. Yo, dawg.
Just give me a little time... :P
It would be nice if they would do something about the obvious corporate spam. Just today I check the latest articles feed and some company has posted nearly a dozen articles in a row that all read as templated advertisements with maybe a paragraph or two of semi-coherent text before the same spiel of advertising their company. And the kicker is, they aren't a software dev company and the articles have nothing to do with software development.
Not to mention the countless articles with no content other than a link to some website. It's one thing to have a low bar of entry so as to foster new devs, but there seems to be no bar at all.
There are five 'share' buttons on every article, but no 'report spam' button. That suggests to me that they don't really care how spammy the content is.
So my suggestions are:
The internet isn't new, we have over a decade of experience showing that for-profit entities WILL abuse any and every system they can if it has the slightest chance of earning them a fraction of a penny, even to the detriment of the system. Either we put a stop to it now or we'll have to add devto to the long list of well intentioned projects that devolve into nothing more than a feed for ad spam.
Some subreddit have a pretty hard stance on self-promotion. Maybe that could inspire some necessary change here.
There was recently an 'okayish' article about "how to get stars on github" and, lo-and-behold, all the examples were from the author's own github page. Writing about "how to get github stars" to get github stars: how meta!
This half-hidden self-promotion bothers me and maybe should be against the rules. A discreet link to your own blog or github page is fine, of course.
Reminds me of the old truism in the 90s that the only way to make money from the internet was to write a book on how to make money from the internet.
Thanks for these insights and suggestions! We completely agree with you that outright advertising doesn't belong in articles. We even have the Listings section for ads of all kinds as a way for people to promote to/recruit from the DEV Community, and try to direct people to this as often as possible.
As @terabytetiger mentions, all users can report spam on any article by clicking the
...beneath the reaction icons. We encourage you to make full use of this tool to bring spam to the attention of the site admins.We remove as much spam as we can each day, thanks to the watchful eyes of our community (and volunteer mods in particular), but the more reports we get the faster the clean-up is. Please feel free to report anything you're unsure about: even if we don't agree it's a valid report after review, there's no penalty to the OP or reporter. We genuinely welcome your spam reports!
Under the "..." menu there is a "Report Abuse" option (which should be available to everyone, not just community mods - but let me know if that's not the case).
Spam and link only articles fall under the "Abuse" umbrella since they are against the terms of use for DEV :)
I know I'm revivifying an ancient post here, but as someone who occasionally writes corporate content, I am 100% with you. Professionally speaking, if you can't present content that aligns with your company's goals in a way that leans more towards the user's needs than promotion, you just... shouldn't write it. It's hard to do so, which is why it's so frustrating seeing people not even try.
I've personally had similar thoughts about the content on the site. I'd love to see more variation in content and especially content that dives deeper into technical topics - like one of the most interesting articles I read was someone working on a bootloader and VGA driver. I have anti-follow tags across a variety of topics but that only works on well-tagged articles.
Regarding the experience level of content, I know in the settings there is a value to "nudge" the content you see to a particular experience level. Perhaps that needs to be more aggressive and maybe automatically detecting content experience level. Content of all experience levels should be welcome, just the audience for that content should be in control of what they see.
With low quality listicles - it is hard because on one hand, there likely are people that love to know about the best 5 VS Code extensions in 2021. I know DEV is aware of this type of stuff and are looking into ways to improve the feed. Again it is probably more a case to allow the content but give control to who wants to see it.
I think with measures that give control to the reader of what content they see, there might end up being less incentive to produce lower quality articles or just rehashing the same concept for the 100th time (less views, less reactions etc).
For me the home feed quality has gotten so bad that I don't even use it. I've kinda just ended up only using DEV to share my own content than browse the content of others. I only find out about new articles on DEV when they're shared by people I follow on Twitter.
It's not automatic, but community mods can actually set that for newly written articles, as well flagging them high quality or low quality, both of which are functions which I use regularly, trying to make the experience better for everyone. :)
I don't know the internal's about the algorithm in that sense, but yeah, maybe that needs to be more aggressive, maybe push up/down articles further, if community mods are in the same boat about the skill level and/or the overall quality of the article.
Yeah, I've seen the option when I've moderated a post. Unfortunately I don't think it is something that can scale very well - community moderators would need to effectively read every article to appropriately mark its experience level.
I think some basic automation could tackle some low hanging fruit like if the beginner tag is on an article, the experience level can be determined. Even some basic phrases like "101", phrases typically used to describe certain levels of difficulty.
Beyond automation, maybe the author could actually set the experience level themselves (not sure if they can already)? If the experience level ties into what content people see, the author has an intrinsic need to set the appropriate value to maximise the audience enjoyment. Setting it wrong could mean the wrong people see it and thus might get less views/reactions/shares etc.
They can! Append
/manageto the end of any of your posts to set the experience level.We would love to see more authors make use of this additional feature. As you say, it really is in their best interests to target their audience the best they can:
Awesome that it is possible though how obvious is that to users? I know there is a "manage" link once a post is created but it seems like it would be worth having on the actual post creation page.
This is good feedback for sure.
I think that this is pretty hidden in the UI as well as the ability to anti-follow tags that you mentioned previously.
In future UI updates, we should consider making these features more easily discoverable.
Just want to add: checked out the /manage functionality, and a scale of 1-10 is wayyy too intimidating. A simple scale of "beginner, mid-level, advanced, expert" would probably be fine. I spent a couple minutes trying to decide, hmmm, is this post better suited for level 6 or level 7? Am I sacrificing views if I choose a higher level?
Oooo I like this idea. Simplifying the scale here makes a lotta sense.
Agreed. I've literally sat for a minute trying to decide 4? or 5?... or 4?
I have to agree, and I think this was a really good, insightful writeup. I've found myself less engaged with this community over time, and I think a lot of it has been because I'm finding less and less genuinely useful / informative articles on here. The solution is, unfortunately, far less easy to define than the problem.
I wonder if there could be benefit in some kind of "Blog Writing 101" type resource that dev.to could offer? I know when I was just starting out, I wanted to write, but a lot of what I was seeing were those kinds of low-effort listicle type articles. Many people learn by emulating what's around them, and I definitely wrote a lot of that kind of stuff, too, just trying to figure out how this whole "blog writing" thing worked. It took me some time to move past that stage and into finding my own voice and style. I wonder if there's some guidance we could offer folks who fall into that "junior fullstack javascript developer fresh out of bootcamp" category that could help them identify good opportunities for content and generally level up their writing. I think a lot of them are genuinely trying to create good content, but simply don't have the knowledge / resources and are just imitating the other articles that they're seeing here – and reinforcing that kind of loop even more.
In writing circles, there's a strong community of "beta readers" who work with authors to help offer feedback and review their writing before a story gets shared. Maybe dev.to could offer some kind of author / beta reader pairing system for new folks looking to get another set of eyes on their work before it's posted? Like being able to open a PR on your blog article, haha :)
👍👍
Great ideas, Kathryn. A "Blog Writing 101" post (or many posts) would be great for the community, especially if the DEV team promoted them to new accounts.
I had some thoughts inspired by your comment dev.to/seangwright/comment/1g4bm
The DEV team would love to have content like this to share with new accounts and/or people who contact us asking why their content isn't gaining traction. If you write or run across any articles like this, please bring them to our attention by @-mentioning me, @michaeltharrington , or @itscasey , or forwarding the link to yo@dev.to 🙌
I’ve often thought that a beta reader feature would be great or having the opportunity to have your content ‘edited’ or proof read would be awesome. I think this could be an opportunity for some level of mentorship as well.
I would love to write more but I don’t have a ton of time to do so right now. However, it would be great to be able to contribute by offering feedback and suggesting edits to other’s content.
I think prepublish review and editing is something sadly lacking from a lot of ‘user generated content’ platforms. Having features to enable this would be a big plus for Dev and Forem in my mind.
I think what this really boils down to is working out what content you, as the user, wants to see and how Dev can better filter out things of no interest.
As you've mentioned there are lots of top 10 lists, which don't really interest me either but are really popular, so some people out there must like them. We'd be remiss to blanket ban people from writing articles like that.
Something I imagine could be done is making it more clear at the time of posting that people can set an experience level for their post and also have experience level more heavily impact what is seen.
On the topic of junior devs making lots of posts. Before I was a dev I was writing posts on Dev and without them I wouldn't be a dev now. Honestly they weren't that interesting but they gave me purpose. The few people that came back and read them each week and left comments gave me the confidence I needed to change career.
The way I see it Dev is a resource, a way to share information. You can share that information by posting a post or by helping someone who's learning in the comments of their post and I don't mind doing that.
That all being said I would agree that post quality is dipping, as you rightly say, this because there are now lots of people on the platform but I'm not really sure raising the bar of entry is the solution.
As I said earlier better feed curation would be my preference, maybe things like this
Another solution that might work, this is a half baked idea that came to me as I typed so it might not go anywhere. There could be a "following only" feed which only shows posts from people you follow (just like a twitter feed). Users could then endorse posts, when they endorse a post it would be like a retweet, you see who endorsed it and it would be on your feed.
This would be a new sort of feed and the old feeds could still exist as "Discover" feeds. I imagine if you don't follow very many people it could show you posts from people that are similar (with a message saying similar to Tom Jones).
I agree that we shouldn't try to "raise the bar". When people are starting out, it's great for them to have a place they can post and find their voice, and as far as I'm concerned it doesn't matter if what they're saying has already been said.
However, we do need a way to filter things so that's not dominating people's feeds. And while meta-articles and lists can have value, most of the ones here are just churn.
I've been regularly browsing dev.to for the last two years and everything you've said rings true. It used to be that most of the articles in my feed were pretty interesting and well written, right now I often struggle to find ones that provide value.
I like what Kathryn had to say about providing resources to teach authors how to write better content
dev.to/kathryngrayson/comment/1g423
Here's the first technical blog post I ever wrote, way back in 2012
seangwright.me/blog/development/ob...
It's not very good at all!
There were two problems with that post:
However, I'm still glad I wrote something because it set me down the path to where I am now, writing dozens of blog posts a year, speaking at conferences, and representing a developer community.
We definitely do not want to institute any gatekeeping here!
For many developers writing on DEV, English might be their second or third language. They are, as has been noted, junior developers, and maybe just don't know how to author a well written post about software development.
Instead, if we want to improve the quality of the content, let's do something foster writing talents!
Maybe those in the community with more writing experience could create some videos that walk others through the writing and editing process. They could explain what types of contributions bring value to the community.
I've noticed a lot of posts that have trouble formatting their content with code fencing, structuring paragraphs, and really just telling a coherent story.
These are things that can be taught and I feel many would be receptive to this type of content.
I'd love anyone's thoughts or feedback on these ideas.
I think the problem as an author is that to produce some actually interesting content takes a long time, but your content is buried under a pile of repetitive content very quickly - even if it is significantly rated. Addressing the home page sorting and including algorithm might help with that.
It would need to address highly rated content per tag not per post I'd guess as commentary pieces have immediate appeal and tend to garner very high votes whereas technical content tends to have a slower burn but potentially higher value.
I know I feel lucky when I drop in and get to read something that makes me say "aha". You have to be here often for that to happen though given the sheer volume of the aforementioned content.