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...
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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 โ 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 โmost popular tagsโ, I would like to see an option in โMy Tagsโ 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.
โ๏ธ This is all described in excellent detail by @afif in the post ๐ก 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 ๐
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 โ 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 :)
๐๐
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 ๐
Iโve often thought that a beta reader feature would be great or having the opportunity to have your content โeditedโ 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 donโt 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 otherโs content.
I think prepublish review and editing is something sadly lacking from a lot of โuser generated contentโ 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.
This article brings up some thoughts that have been nesting in my head for awhile. I joined in 2018 and back then I felt the community was much closer nit and a higher percentage of articles were of quality. This could just be confirmation bias of course. However, I think there are far too many redundant articles.
As far as solutions I have some loose ideas that could be refined. First and foremost do not add any negative user reactions: dislikes, mark as duplicate, etc. Humans have a tendency to focus on negative emotions so adding user moderation via negation focused tools would promote poor behavior. So we have the unicorn reaction, which I assume is for uniqueness, which we could allow users to sort by. Promoting people to mark articles as unique and interesting would be an excellent way user moderation. Another idea is to allow people to tag articles to help increase relevancy.
Just a bit of food for thought.
I like the idea of being able to mark a post unique. Good idea ๐
Tagging articles wouldn't help though. People would just tag every article with the most low-hanging fruit tags ('javascript', 'css', etc...).
An idea I had was being able to custom filter your feed based on presets. So perhaps you have a preset1 for your feed with beginner/javascript an other preset2 with more advanced and a preset3 with only java etc... So basically you get multiple "global" feeds which you can switch between.
I agree with having presets, that seems like it would definitely help finding articles that are relevant.
This article has my compassion. I love the platform, but it is really hard to discover articles which I would like to read. A solid recommendation system is what this platform is lacking: everything else is just perfect. I do not care how many low-quality posts are out there if I don't get to see them in my feed.
To me, the problems you describe are not necessarily related to dev.to, but more to the industry and the Internet at large.
You can moderate, remove, and ban, but the root problems will stay the same. Dev.to is not positioned on a "High quality platform where people speak about diverse tech without any ad", it's more the contrary to me actually. Everybody can speak about everything related to IT. And, to be honest, it's nice, especially when you see other platforms which try to sensor everything with nonsensical algorithms.
This hit the spot. How about semi-adopting Stackoverflow's suggestion mechanism?
For example- blogger wants to create a post about "How to use Docker", and while typing the title, DEV.to can suggest:
"There are 237648327642876 posts about how to get started with Docker, are you sure you want to add another one?"
@ben - what do you think? :)
This will not stop them from writing the articles. That never worked on Stack Overflow. I close a lot of duplicates each day on Stack Overflow and in 70% of the cases the duplicate I use is the first one suggested by the site when writing the title.
Super sad, that usually what stops me from asking a question in SO :/
Even if it doesn't stop low-quality posts, this would help serious writers produce better content.
From my point of view
Okay, some points is true and I have the same feeling as @samuelfaure .
I see most of DEV posts around JS/React and HTML/CSS, I'm into that but I appreciate read/learn others stuffs like languages, culture of devs or wathever with good content. No links to 'Read more at' or just a embed with the code source and nothing more...
Even the little contents of people who start to learn a language I'm happy to read, so maybe it's not the most interesting topic of my comment, but if you who read this start to learn something and you want to share it, do so! Don't be afraid! It's a great way to learn more, to get feedback which is always nice, and nobody eats here (Si?)
The proof, my very first post here was when I started learning Ruby, it's still online and my very first comments are golden nuggets.
Find The Number
Thomas Bnt ใป Jun 2 '18 ใป 1 min read
Second part, I'm agreed :
I totally agree with that, I see most of the time on the homepage this kind of posts, and for some people they like it, but after a while it becomes boring and it makes you less interested in reading the articles on the homepage
StackOverflow and DEV
Why did you add StackOverflow as a shortcut? Usually people don't take the time to write down their problem and just copy and paste as many tags as possible. I find that it stains the platform. Help should always be part of it, but just throwing in a StackOverflow link and putting the same title again... might as well write "Read me more at [link]".
If you don't know what I mean, when you share on StackOverflow, you can create a post here, very easily.
I was speaking to you as a DEV member. What follows is about the moderation part.
It's almost the same, I moderate some tags and I see from time to time empty posts, here just to signal and mark its presence on DEV. I'm often wondering if I should downvote the post to make it less prominent or just report it as spam/nothing to do here.
I have forgotten some points, I am aware, but I would like to share some points that I think are right.
After multiple readings, I'm still not understanding your comment about StackOverflow. Can you clarify?
It seems like you're asking me "Why did you add StackOverflow as a shortcut?" but I did not link to SO in my post ?
No not you ^^
StackOverflow added "Share on DEV" on this platform.
When you share here from SO, it's prefilled to post on DEV.
Oh I didn't even know that was a thing
I would say that I agree with this 100%. I get the email digests and for a while, probably at least all of 2021 so far, I haven't opened but maybe a handful of links to articles -- this being one of them.
The content isn't all that pertinent to me unfortunately. I recognize that I could contribute some -- and have intended to for a long time. I haven't had as much time to read as I would like -- and unfortunately for writing, reading is better for me in terms of where I am professionally.
For a long time now "listicles" and similar style content has been quite frankly, mostly just garbage akin to blogspam. It would probably would be best of they were banned -- or relegated to a corner somewhere.
@afif / @ellativity Given you two are moderators, maybe this suggestion is best directed toward you instead of the ether -- maybe you can share it somewhere it would gain traction.
I think I agree with @samuelfaure 'successful' content needs to be de-emphasized. Or at a minimum limit how much JavaScript gets focus. There is much more to development than JavaScript, et al. The only way to encourage different content is going to be to promote it.
I think human curation and multiple "interest topics" subscription options -- have an entry level focused digest and more for other/advanced topics.
Dev.to desperately needs categorization and taxonomy. If it had this then you could create newsletters with more curated content. That of course has more limited use if all of the content is primarily for "Junior Bootcamp Dev" level.
I'll do my part by trying to work up some "higher level" content to share -- but as of yet I haven't been inspired :D
as a moderator we already have a tool to "downvote" posts so they are less visbile but unfortunately it's not enough because the algorithm also consider the reactions so it's hard to fight the bad listicles getting a ton of reactions that's why I suggested in the above a "nuclear button" that is immune to reactions and can allow us to remove an articles, not from the site, but at least from the feed.
Yeah, You definitely need better tools. It is like a lot of other places though... low effort, 'click bait', low quality things tend to do better... and why wouldn't you spend time on that if you can do barely anything instead of creating something actually profound? Valuable content is more difficult to produce.
Tbh most of my articles are niche articles. Yes I do use the beginner tag for my articles. I think the mods for that tag has their work cut out for them. Which i appreciate their effort as I used it from time to time that they remove the tag ๐ .
I think in terms of curator of the top articles. I believe it might be better for tag mods to recommend articles of their own respective tags. Where as the higher amount of non-affiliated mobs can vote for the best by taking turns each week.
I'm one of those non-tag affiliated mods so I kind of like the idea there is more discussion on and voting for the best top 7 articles.
Totally with you on this. I am tired of seeing articles like "10 BEST React libraries" and "5 Github projects every developer MUST know!". It is frustrating. There is no quality there. These are just lists. Literally. Thank you for writing this post.
I feel you Samuel, I myself have written some - not so beginner friendly - articles and feel very discouraged to keep writing because not only the lack of visibility it gets (I know my work can be very niche) but the overall content of the website.
I feel like there's not much space for me here.
I use feedly and if I passed 1 day without checking dev.to I have new 200 entries... WTF !!!
Lastly I am evaluating remove it because simply is not possible with that all noise.
I think there's no way to minimize listings and junior-level content. It's not about the platform: this kind of content gets more reactions on Twitter and other social media.
To me as a content writer and an online marketer the reason is crystal clear: junior and middle-level devs make up the most of the audience. They look for easy tips and solutions, they are the most active and engaging that's why this content has many reactions.
So I see the only solution here: platforms need to encourage advanced-level content and its writers. For example, dev.to could provide special sections for quality and advanced content, offer plaform achievements and rewards so that experienced devs could easily access the content and its writers could get their share of recognition from other experienced devs.
Very thoughtful article - I've had pretty much these same thoughts and feelings about dev.to for quite a long time, and now I see them put into words - this is spot on!
Been a dev.to reader/follower almost from the start (yes, I'm also a defector from Medium!), and I can say that in the beginning the site definitely had a different "feel" - there was a lot more quality over quantity, you hardly saw "listicles", a lot less self promotion ... more interesting content I would say, and also more of a community feeling.
I think this is the inevitable consequence of growth, you definitely can't blame dev.to - and the funny thing is that this is something only we "veterans" will notice - people who discovered the site recently will be blissfully unaware.
And yes, there's a heavy focus on junior devs, people entering the profession, but that's something that I can't take issue with - I acknowledge that it's important for the whole industry that we bring people on board, for a long time we've complained about shortages and about being unable to get good people, so I see this surge in bootcamps and all that as something that was long overdue, and inevitable.
The "solution", assuming that we need one, would probably be better categorization and filtering - people should be able to filter their feed more effectively. You wanna read more about Ruby, Rails, PHP and so on? Indicate it in your preferences. More advanced materials, fewer "listicles", fewer short and simple articles (React Hooks Intro anyone?) - check it in your filter settings.
I'm not really in favor of "curating" upfront too heavily, although outright "spam" (I've seen posts that had nothing to do with dev and were nothing more than company advertisements) should of course be nuked, and I think that already happens. But we probably shouldn't take this too far, I think the platform or the site should remain low barrier to entry.
So, better and more extensive categorization and filtering is what I would bet on.
At the risk of sounding extreme, perhaps what's needed here is a clean break.
codeart.communityis availableThere is a beginner community using the same Forem software:
community.codenewbie.org/
It's established too late, so that all the bootcampers are already here.
I see some of what you mean - the relentless โTop X for Yโ is prominent and always gets included in the roundup emails and front page... as if there was some kind of algorithm driving it. I know that there is not โ there are people behind the decisions for which articles to feature, and their focus at present appears to be to uplift and promote the new starters. I applaud this, but it leads to the selection effect we're seeing.
On the other hand, I am mindful of the outrage in computer magazines of the 1990s when HyperCard became popular, and the developers then bemoaned the uprising of โcookie cutter spaghetti card stacks, cobbled together by amateurs&rdquo. That's totally the wrong mindset, and glaringly backwards-looking with the hindsight of the game Myst (made by non-programmers), and the Web, which exploded only a few years later.
So my take is really that:
The first drives the second, though. So we need to get cracking on posts.
I'm guilty too: I've been lurking here for a couple years with no posts and only the occasional comment.
100% agree. I loved Dev.to in the beginning and moved my blogs from Medium to here. Initially, I had great success and was motivated to produce quality content but then at some point Dev.to became a place for listicles and the only posts getting on the top pages (and even top 7 of the week) were listicles. I even experimented by creating a few listicles of my own (not very proud of that, as they look less than 10 minutes to create) and they did much better than the posts I really spent effort by researching a lot, making example codes, graphics etc. So decided to move blogs to a Jekyll and host on my own. Now its doing much better than the success I had with Dev.to, I still syndicate the posts here, since I gathered a good following here and didn't want to disappoint them.
Overall Dev.to needs to address the quality issue so that it doesn't become like Medium
This is a great post. Thank you!
I honestly don't have a solution either, but I just wanted to say that I joined dev.to thinking that it would have been a place where I could read some interesting posts about in-depth features of the languages I use the most (C++, Rust), meanwhile I keep on receiving top post about very shallow topics or "your first X in Y" tutorials.
I am hoping that this discussion will become big enough to reach the people behind Dev.to and push them to solve this issue.
@link2twenty mentioned
Well, I need to agree, yet there's may be another solution to work on articles quality by motivating devs to write more ambitious pieces.
I guess, we could inspire from hashnode and introduce some challenges, which could embrace community (I think special events and what have you learned this week are great at this). The sense of competition and earning some kind of respect for bringing quality content to the platform would be rewarding and encouraging to write about more advanced topics.
This in conjunction with mentioned in comments setting the level of article advancement and user preferences could result in curated feed matching readers interests.
Additionaly, I think the best content is usally written on personal blogs because of full control over the platform. Maybe such challenges would encourage top technical writers to more often syndicate content to dev.to
funny that you mention reddit as a positive(?) example for "best" articles. But maybe it used to be a good site before my time, just like the mythical "tech twitter" that I never knew. Anyway, I am happy that you did not give up writing on DEV ever since.
A while ago I enjoyed this website, lots of interesting debate and some useful articles but I 100% agree with the sentiment of this post.
This will sound awful but I've written things recently that I know are more valuable than most of the very low quality crap that appears on the homepage, but what's the point?
Most people's articles won't get any traction fighting against the spam that plagues the homepage nowadays.
Working as a dev advocate, this site is one of the places I go to work: promoting interesting tutorials and ideas that will appeal to people. As such its vagaries are quite fascinating to me: that beginner content is dominant isn't that surprising considering that the tech industry is trying to double in size in the next five years, but other stuff is more surprising like the heavy weighting on recent posts. Anything from last month feels invisible. It's almost a hybrid of Twitter and Medium, with content going stale quite fest. That contributes to a sort of 'treadmill' feel where a 'beginner's guide to GitHub' gets to the top of the charts almost every week.
I find that Dev encourages a blend of content. Everything from short punchy discussion questions, to longer tutorials, to beginner's tips. No one content type is dominant and that feels about right.
One of the questions not addressed here is how you handle the fact that communities often calve off into sub-boards, and Dev's tagging system doesn't really allow for that. There's no way to say definitively "I only want to talk about Java running on AWS, and I don't want to read any Javascript at all" (It turns out you can mute tags per Michael's advice by giving a negative weighting on 'my tags')
I would say that human effort plays a huge part in the general vibes of Dev, and it's helped enormously: you'll note that 'a beginner's guide to Git' is no longer the #1 article in the digest... every week.
I agree. I wrote a few articles near the beginning which garnered a lot of attention. I spoke from my own heart. I wasn't really trying to anything like advertise. Some of my posts got hazed because they were poor quality. I respected that. Some of my posts got lots of good feedback because I tried really hard.
I offered to help out with development and other things related to the site. Nothing but silence.
Now the site has become something different and I have zero interest in writing anything further here. It's shifted to something negative and I barely check here anymore.
I love what everyone has done with DEV and I think it had an awesome start. I think it can be that once more. It's just not that right now.
Excellent points made in the article and the comments. Personally, I avoid anything where the title contains a number, exclamation marks or a superlative ("amazing", "awesome" etc) or the "what I did in school today" posts from students of a certain coding school that seem to have flooded the web recently that are rarely much more complex than how to turn the computer on.
Having said that, if there was closer moderation, I wouldn't want it to be like on Stack Overflow where you get told off or deleted for not wording something in the correct way or putting your answer in the wrong box. I gave up posting there a few years ago as moderators tended to be censorious rather than helpful to newbies. I don't know if it has improved.
Agreed sir. I was just having the same thoughts recently about the content feeling very JS centric which makes sense to some extent; however, there are a ton of other language devs out there.
I personally write with JVM languages and need to sit down and write more than the one post Iโve got to my name lol.
Kotliners, Rubyists , Pythonistas, etc, where are you all?!?
I wrote three article on Redis and spent more than a week researching Redis and making quality and useful tutorials along with working examples.
Sadly, one of the articles got less than 150 views while the other almost 2k.
It's totally unclear to me how the algorithm works.
And making it to the newsletter is next to impossible. Looks like articles about creating Start Rating are very popular because the other days there was a DEV digest with 3 articles out of 6 dedicated to this topic ...
The problem is beyond Dev. The target consumers are the new developers who happen to pick JavaScript as their first language. So the question becomes, why does everyone want to learn JavaScript first? The simple answer, JS has a rich ecosystem and a friendly community.
If other language communities want something similar, they need to flesh out resources like JS or Python. These languages are so wildly popular because they support new learners.
The other communities have this subtle selfish vibe -- libraries without documentation, strict licensing, commercialized code, etc. A friendly community requires friendly people.
Strong communities need FREE, high-quality, kid-friendly, and enjoyable learning resources that support small projects.
For example, PHP is a highly dreaded language. It used to takes weeks to make anything good. Now, the community is growing strong thanks to the libraries like Laravel and Symphony. These tools and their surrounding communities help developers build full CRUD apps in days.
Some good points, the only point where I don't agree with you is that dev.to has the same problems as Medium - maybe they share some issues, but not all.
Medium was simply killed as far as I'm concerned by the horrible pay wall, dev.to obviously doesn't have that (the moment they'd even contemplate that, it would be dead, on the spot - completely a no-go).
What sets dev.to apart from Medium is that dev.to feels more like social media, a community, and that's also what generates a lot of low quality content. But, on Medium the listicles and the sensationalist click bait titles are also a problem, probably even more so than on dev.to. And on Medium they sell that as "premium content" ;)
Still vastly preferring dev.to over Medium ... without doubt.
The "newsletter" issue should be handled differently than the "feed" issue.
Newsletter Diversity
I would recommend each newsletter have every article be on a different topic. Yes, always include the top 2 or 3 topics on Dev but then have the rest of the articles be from more diverse topics. By doing this it will both provide readers of the newsletter with a more diverse and interesting read, but it will also bring to mind that writing about other topics (not the top 3) is not just acceptable but also gives you a better chance of being added to the newsletter.
As for how to fix the "feed" issue... not sure.
I agree with this. But, I also wrote these kinds of articles. For example, these are the posts on Dev;
Top VSCode extensions
I didn't mean these articles shouldn't be here. But I can't see new technologies anymore as in the past.
THANK YOU for this. I'm not crazy after all it seems. I was starting lose interest in this platform because of all the reasons listed a above. Until the Dev team finds a way to stop letting low quality posts run rampant and bury all the well thought out and creative posts, tag weights will help. I didn't realize it was a thing and I've been here for over a year! Here's more info on that for anyone curious - dev.to/devteam/changelog-adjust-th...
It's like walking into a bootcamp and almost everyone is talking about how to tie shoestrings their way. I don't want organizers to put controls on what people are discussing, but I would like if it were easier to connect with people who have bigger fish to fry.
This discussion reminds me of StackOverflow. There have been many discussions on StackOverflow meta about the dilemma how to prevent good content getting drowned in low-quality (or even factually wrong) contributions.
Their approach, an attempted meritocracy with upvotes, downvotes and a lot of beginner content getting deleted (too) quickly, seems to have several downsides: A gatekeeping mindset that discourages not only beginners but also advanced users making an effort to help beginners, reputation seekers that try to trick the algorithms instead of actually creating value, but maybe the worst disadvantage to me: They still don't succeed in prioritizing high quality content.
StackOverflow, despite all of its efforts to focus on high quality content, is full of outdated, irrelevant, misleading, and even factually false advice and code snippets, making it more of a museum of jQuery code than a go-to resource for getting things done in 2021. (Of course I am deliberately exaggerating to make a point.)
dev.to on the other hand, is one of the most open and welcoming online community for developers and programmers I have seen so far. I have found a lot of information, inspiration, disussion, as well as some entertaining fun stuff to read on dev.to. This is exactly what I love about this platform!
But still ... I keep seeing loads of articles that are either irrelevant to me personally (the mentioned beginners seeking discussion with fellow beginners, tutorials directed at beginners, and the overrepresentation of full-stack JavaScript and React) or spammy, excluding, gatekeeping and misleading (like "16 node modules EVERY developer MUST know in 2022") giving dangerous advice contrary to established consensus in the world of experienced developers, discussed over decades in mailing lists, issues trackers, conferences, books, and on Wikipedia.
I don't want to prevent innovation and thinking outside of the box, but I fear that spam and bad advice by intermediate developers, especially when they act like an authoritative source in their few lines of profile description, can confuse beginners and also harm dev.to's reputation altogether (for fellow developers, but also in the long run, for people making decisions how to prioritize trustworthy sources in search engine results). That that kind of content is annoying me personally should be the least of our worries.
As a personal consequence, I have joined many discussions (on dev.to, and also on StackOverflow meta), followed and liked developers that provide good work (including beginners that didn't show me anything I didn't know so far), but I have also started blocking people (on dev.to and twitter) and downvoting content (on StackOverflow).
I doubt that we could, or even should, try to establish a pseudo-meritocracy like StackOverflow. Maybe dev.to could change their metrics and algorithms. We can give likes, unicorns, bookmarks, we can report, block, or follow, and there are badges to reward achievements. Currently, most dev.to badges seem to reward quantity. For how long have I been a member, and how long do I manage to make a streak of continuous publishing every week.
Somehow, dev.to should rather reward quality, or stop rewarding quantity. Likewise, the number of likes does not indicate high quality. Maybe it doesn't even indicate popularity, I don't know how many people even have a dev.to login and bother to like something they read.
Filters could also be useful. There are hashtags like
#beginnersand topical hashtags like#javascript. Maybe dev.to could add a feedback option to suggest adding or removing hashtags for a post. Then there could be landingpages promoting the tags (there probably are, but I never used them) and maybe we could add filters so that an experienced PHP developer can opt not to see beginner JavaScript content in their feed.I agree with you, but with some nuances. I think dev.to doesn't encourage talking about JS specifically, I think it's a trend that is reflected here, a lot of people are learning about it and a lot of people want to read about it so, there are more people willing to write.
Maybe part of the problem is fixed if there are no likes, no unicorns and no numbers. Without those numbers there is no thought process of "let's write about this just because it gets a lot of attention" or "if I put up these 7 resources I'm going to get a lot of likes with an hour of effort".
I don't know if this is the solution or not, but it will be interesting to rip out all the numbers and see what happens, I guess people will lose motivation and leave any platform that makes this move tho.
I agree that these issues are rampant, I've personally recognized that I engage with dev.to less and less this week. Even as a writer, I try and write more intermediate articles and target them change the settings to say that they're targetted at a specific level of Audience etc and it's clear to see that engagment on those topics falls off.
In terms of solutions though, I don't know if dev.to could've specifically done anything to prevent things getting to this point. I think it's just a reality of our field that juniors (fresh out of bootcamp) just outnumber senios (> 15 years experience) by 100-to-1 at the very least (if not more).
So yea, just the base realities of the market need to be considered and maybe from there we can figure out a solution.
You've outlined exactly why I've stopped coming to Dev.to more than a couple times a month.
To be fair, it was like this while I was most active. I tried to play the game for a little bit (my top post by a huge margin is just a listicle), but it's ultimately not a fulfilling way to go about things.
Occasionally I find some great content on here, but it is fairly difficult. Thankfully the mods who curate the weekly email of best posts do a good job of finding higher quality posts, but relying on that is a poor substitute to a good ecosystem.
A good solution is certainly difficult. Much of it has to do with finding better feedback loops for those who write higher level content or content that is not Javascript related.
A lot of sympathy here. I use dev.to as a stand-in replacement for an RST-based dev blog I host on my personal server, so the social/learning aspects are less important to me. More signal, less noise. Ultimately the "feed fusion" problem comes down to two specific challenges on top of "just a combination of RSS feeds", and it's still a somewhat-solved problem by most social networks (though Twitter's really been struggling lately as they experiment):
Frontier Selection: You want "popular" posts (in terms of interactions, upvotes, comments, etc.), and you want "recent" posts. These are two orthogonal dimensions, so you have a "multi-objective optimization", or MOO, problem. Classic solution is to start from one end of the space and march along the "frontier". Not clear to me that "popular" doesn't override/overweight in the dev.to feed fusion approach.
Discovery: How do you find useful stuff (posts, users) that aren't already fused into your feed? Typically this is done by extrapolating (typically tag-based) from posts and users you have interacted with in some way (with FOLLOW being the strongest interaction of course). It's not 100% clear to me but some tag-extrapolations are much better signal-to-noise than others. Cloud < JavaScript < Kubernetes < Tensorflow < Python < C-Family < GPU, to give one highly subjective example.
While I agree somewhat with the points made as far as some pitfalls that Dev.to may be falling into, I'm not sure I agree about the comparison with Medium. Dev.to has some huge advantages over Medium. Just the fact that you own your own content and it's not going to be put behind a paywall, make it enormously different than Medium! And infinitely more valuable. :)
We need a downvote button.
You are dead on here: Everybody has to start somewhere, and I think multiple takes on things are good, but this site has been SWAMPED with low-quality/poor content articles, or pieces on things that have been covered to death (looking at you, React hooks!).
I am junior js developer fresh out of bootcamp but I feel you on the 5 awesome vs code extensions posts part๐ , every other day someone is writing such posts simply because writing blogs and having an online presence of some sort is kind of required for jobs or internships these days otherwise your profile looks bad, and hence instead to writing quality posts everyone is forced to write rehashed stuff.
Yup, got lots of the same thoughts.
Also, "Junior fullstack javascript developer fresh out of bootcamp" is almost entirely the only angel I take when writing here now as I realized a while ago that all my other content gets nowhere here. Overall though, I've largely just stopped writing and am angling to get some conversations started here.
I am starting to just leave my posts on my own blog instead.
Totally agreed, thank you for writing this @samuelfaure
I'd love to see more variation of content here. Personally, I just read articles by people I follow now unless there's a good article in the feed, which is rare as most articles in the feed are "My neighbors Cat's Favourite VSCode Plugin". Hopefully mods find a solution
I used to think much the same about the status of dev.to, although my view has changed a bit after discovering that I could change the weight of the different tags that I registered interest in.
With the default weights the feed was pretty bad, but after some adjustments to thee weights the feed quality did improve. I had to skip some tags, such as "productivity", which was overused in alll sorts of contexts.
The feed is better - not perfect and certainly some posts that I consider irrelevant. But much better than it used to be.
The various email digests sent out are not so good though, I do not read much of them.
I agree, and this discouraged me from engaging further. I visit 1x every couple weeks, and find the general content to be low-effort vapid posts, sort of a buzz feed for programmers.
There are a couple overarching issues: one is aesthetic (almost cultural) , and the other is technical.
The technical one is less controversial. I don't think dev.to is training their inventory ranking model on the right features. Most likely they are using follower count, like count and other trivial engagement signals to up-rank posts. This favors palatable but unsophisticated content.
Then there is the aesthetic concern of being an inclusive site, where no posts are down-ranked by moderators. With that model, you're not going to encourage sophisticated, complicated, challenging or niche content to get exposure. You'll also have a snowball effect where trivial content is getting up-ranked by the model above.
Why does this matter? Eventually beginners need to be challenged to become something more. So they will either get bored and leave, or stay and milk the likes in a busy loop.
But engineering is supposed to be challenging, quirky, niche. We're supposed to be innovative and controversial. Re-building todo apps in some new JS framework will not make the world any better. We need real creativity & innovation.
For instance: dev.to/valeriavg/master-git-in-7-m...
Here is one article I am going to pick on for a minute; not because there is anything specifically wrong with it... or that it was unhelpful (Clearly based on the comments it was...) but I only saw it because it was pushed via email digest. It was well written and clearly there was some good discussion on it.
We have TONS of "intro to git" articles. Do we need more? The title is disingenuous. You aren't mastering git in 7 minutes. Git is complex and has a LOT of features. Nobody is mastering that in a few days even.
Is this something that should be pushed out via the digest emails?
I think this brings up the need (discussed elsewhere here) for finding a way to group content by "experience level" or "interest" or something.
That's very interesting, thanks for your writing.
As a writer on Dev, I see that as my knowledge deepens and the articles on my blog have more traction, I have less and less engagement on Dev. Sometimes it's even questionable whether I should keep posting here. But it's part of habits and it's not a big work as we have a good editor, so I keep doing it.
As a tag moderator I see that many articles don't have anything to do with their tags and/or they are low quality. Sometimes they are called intros that are overly shallow even for basic topics, sometimes I don't even understand what they meant to be.
Of course, there are high quality articles, but it's getting harder and harder to find them.
I don't see an easy solution. Moderating hashly and having a sorting algorithm that favours non-downvoted articles could help.
I often wonder how a publishing platform would look like that promotes content that people actually read rather than skim through. Like capturing metrics that represent reading time and training a model on that dataset.
Ah, thanks @samuelfaure for this. A timely commentary.
From an automation point of view, I would very much like to be able to follow someone and then have their liked content be recommended to me. For example, I'm a PHP developer so I would be motivated to follow other readers who are also interested in PHP. Then perhaps I could see a feed of likes by those that I follow.
So a kind of crowdsourced recommendation engine why I decide who my "crowd" is.
Farez
When neophytes dominate the consumer base, neophyte content will be the most viewed/selected content. The current upvote/view count type rating system just perpetuates this feature. Should voters become weighted as to experience or content? Establishing/maintaining a voter cast system would probably become very labor intensive, (elitist?).
Article writers could use some category selection to indicate the general tech/topic they covered by selecting from a topic list when posting, or by parsing for topic focus. It is then used as a selector to choose n of each topic to present as headliner postings. Keeping the top/headline topics under control would be more intuitive. Fewer headline topics for their rotation over a time interval. Next, limit the number of articles presented for each headline topic. Their titles alone would cause more awareness to the "5 major reasons you should ignore this article" type postings. This could give rise to a more permanent topic class. "Of interest to new/beginning Devs", moving some/most of that content under that topic and off the main posting list.
Fewer toping means that developers could both find or even feel like creating an article matching their interests.
This would only apply to the headlined articles and those remaining could appear in the general list below them.
"I just learned how to do X / the wrong way with React. Let me show you the way."
"Everything I learned about HTML the one day I spent learning it. It's easy if you just ignore reality."
"39 best things that no one needs to know about."
Unfortunatly - posts about "making dev better" - are also now in this list of soon to be tired subjects.
I could not have said it better.
I used to visit dev.to every morning because I found so many different things outside and inside of work life. And the quality of the content was amazing. And now.. Well, you said it. The value that my feed brings is low AF. Most of the contents are repetitive or written for generic topics and hence I started to visit less and even ignoring the weekly newsletter.
Very true.
Some time ago a lot of react, css or introducions about Promises posts started showing on the feed and on the newsletters. I asked for help and they told me to antifollow unwanted tags. I did that. Then the feed started showing posts about tags I really didn't even knew they existed. I then followed all the tags so I could antifollow the unwanted ones. Then, the feed and the newsletters started showing posts about vscode (antifollowed because I use vim), react or 'I made another 100 css loaders for you'. I have given c, c++ and webassembly top rankings but I don't see any of those. They just show the ones that I mentioned above and stuff like best practises to follow. Maybe medium is shit, but at least they give you what you are interested in.
This is a refreshing article. I love that you don't point blame at the authors, who are just using the platform as it was intended, and are just trying to get their feet wet with blogging. I agree that the quality could be better tuned and also tired of the 20 Tips to Pass that Tech Interview style of writing. In a way this feels like Twitter without the character limit. There should be a way to follow and curate your "feed" to allow you to choose who shows up on your own pages. At least this way you could find and promote folks you want to see more of.
So, here's a vote for better curation tools across the site, as well as a way for you to have a better influence over your own "feed".
I wish I could attach some screenshots from my mailbox here just to support your points. The most topics here are about VS Code Exts this n that, React this n that. Yes some of the content is really helpful but not everyone uses VS Code(Only), I mean there is more to Dev than that, and its missing out here. Someone might be like "Why don't you write it yourself" , well we can't all be content creators. At least those who are choosing to create posts here should broaden their researches.
Lots of comments.
Maybe we need a way to indicate our level in the topics we follow. So we see the level we are interested in. Say two levels.
I want:
Beginner & Intermediate
Some such.
Also ability to submit topics we would like writers to cover with a level indicated.
Seems like a difficult issue to solve.
The catered towards the "Junior fullstack javascript developer fresh out of bootcamp" is exactly what I have been feeling as well. Maybe dev.to will end up as "the stepping stone on your path towards more advanced knowledge".
Yeah... I come here occasionally because there's definitely something I like, but I often find myself wading through a bunch of stuff trying to find something that more than surface-level. There's plenty here, just that as you said, there's a lot of fluff that's hard to pick through.
Personally, I'm a fan of the reddit model where the better content can bubble up to the top by creating a weighted score that take both recency and upvotes/downvotes into account.
Hi Samuel,
This is great content and a great question.
Dev.to was great at the beginning indeed. But content are indeed becoming very similar as things are moving on.
I am trying to write articles about Secure Development and Practice and that makes me realize how hard it is to produce good content (at least what I think is good content).
But more than that how to have interactions with people so that they can find that content that should interest them based on what they are looking for.
I don't have the answer either.
This is so true and I totally agree with you. I regularly weekly, usually at friday/saturday browse my weekly feed to find non-repetitive content relevant to me and how time passes there is less and less quality articles, sometimes none, to save to my reading list.
I don't follow javascript, beginners, html, css, webdev, etc. tags and my feed is polluted again with that kind of articles and that is something that bothers me a lot. Maybe this platform must change name to jsdev.to.
Authors like @bytebodger whose content is so valuable must be more visible over authors who advertise their businesses or crosslinking their github repos or blogs without any content.
Some kind of content curation (AI-assisted or by human) is needed to platform to survive and last.
100% agree. I stopped reading dev.to because of tonns of repeating content about React, yet another CSS tutorial, another how-to-write-navbar-without-jquery etc.
I'm a frontend developer with special interest in hybrid mobile apps (ionic, cordova) or native in Flutter. There's no interesting content about it here or it is needed to dig very deep to find it.
I'm tired of reading nth time about CSS selectors, React basics (I'm Angular dev btw) or even worse - tonns of "articles" with lack of information, two lines of code and a link to full version on external blog or youtube video.
But all I said doesn't mean it's really bad. To be honest it depends on our experience. Dev.to is a great place for newbies who are interested in technology they learn - I was the same. But for every level higher than junior there is nothing worth digging.
This certainly makes sense, itโs been getting tricky to find useful articles even as a junior dev; Iโd be curious to see if the move to Forem helping build out different community-focused sites might help?
I recall that discussion, either in DevNews or DevDiscuss, where they talked about allowing narrower, drier communities to grow around different tech stacks.
Maybe this would let folks diving deep into Ruby, Swift, Rust, etc have better curation off the bat because they arenโt pushing through endlessly popular โComplete Guide to Reactโ or โGeneric VSCode Listicleโ spam. It could also let us novices have a bit more space within those communities to write articles as we gain skills.
I see some of what you mean - the relentless "Top X for Y" is prominent and always gets included in the roundup emails and front page... as if there was some kind of algorithm driving it. I know that there is not -- there are people behind the decisions for which articles to feature, and their focus at present appears to be to uplift and promote the new starters. I applaud this, but it leads to the selection effect we're seeing.
On the other hand, I am mindful of the outrage in computer magazines of the 1990s when HyperCard became popular, and the developers then bemoaned the uprising of "cookie cutter spaghetti card stacks, cobbled together by amateurs". That's totally the wrong mindset, and glaringly backwards-looking with the hindsight of the game Myst (made by non-programmers), and the Web, which exploded only a few years later.
So my take is really that:
The first drives the second, though. So we need to get cracking on posts.
I'm guilty too: I've been lurking here for a couple years with no posts and only the occasional comment.
To be fair a lot of developer social platforms are overrun by content targeted to "junior fullstack JavaScript developers fresh out of bootcamp.โ Iโve lamented about this on Twitter as well. I donโt see that changing so long as people keep pouring into that demographic.
While reading, I got to the following sentence and stopped to comment
"What I'm trying to say is that writing should be motivated by mostly altruistic reasons, rather than selfish ones."
If only it could be true!!!
While reading, I got to the following sentence and stopped to comment:
"What I'm trying to say is that writing should be motivated by mostly altruistic reasons, rather than selfish ones."
If only it could be true!!!
While reading, I got to the following sentence and stopped to comment:
"What I'm trying to say is that writing should be motivated by mostly altruistic reasons, rather than selfish ones." ๐๐ฝ๐๐ฝ๐๐ฝ๐๐ฝ
If only it could be true!!!
While reading, I got to the following sentence and stopped to comment:
"What I'm trying to say is that writing should be motivated by mostly altruistic reasons, rather than selfish ones." ๐๐ฝ๐๐ฝ๐๐ฝ๐๐ฝ๐๐ฝ
If only it could be true!!!
Interesting, short before getting my digest in my mail inbox with this article I published a short argument on introducing a peer review system to dev.to:
Would a peer review process improve dev.to?
Jan Kรผster ใป Jul 8 ใป 1 min read
I have also noticed that there is a huge imbalance between sub-communities and the content on DEV. It makes sense that there would be A LOT of JavaScript, CSS, and React content. There's a significant amount of overlap between those topics and the content that bootcamp and college gradutes would seek to produce. This is because it's accessible to newcomers! These web-based languages and frameworks were designed to be as accessible, and as free-form as possible, so that their popularity would explode.
Of course, that doesn't mean that the other topics (Dev Ops, Dev Relations, C, C++, Go, Ruby, Python, etc.) aren't growing. It just means they aren't growing as explosively. That makes sense since they are smaller and serve different niches.
I've often thought about how my most popular post, that still gets traffic is a post about my very custom hosting solution for WordPress that I haven't used or supported in years:
Hosting WordPress over HTTPS with Docker
Forest Hoffman ใป Sep 29 '17 ใป 12 min read
My journey while building Twitch chat bots became it's own series of posts, because of the numerous pitfalls that I encountered:
Building a Twitch.tv Chat Bot with Go - Part 1
Forest Hoffman ใป Dec 20 '17 ใป 4 min read
I think the void of content we are seeing is due to a lack of senior developers whom have already walked the poorly documented path and have not turned around to share their experience. Junior developers are writing and sharing so often, because they are trying to claw their way into the industry and make themselves known. That's the reality that senior developers and executives have created for them. However, the same rule-makers aren't as likely to reach down and help those less experienced than themselves. Thus we have a knowledge sharing gap in the industry. Changing this would require a complete mindset shift in the industry, which we all know isn't going to happen any time soon.
We are seeing this translate to DEV, as more and more of our industry joins.
Solutions
Having a manually curated feed (anything larger than the top posts mailing list) would be very unmaintainable and would not scale, and opens itself to a whole can of worms regarding impartiality, etc. The DEV community has a growing number of moderators, whom help to filter out posts and comments from bad actors. This is great! However, I suspect that the tagging system could be improved. Currently the tag list for each post is limited to 4 tags.
I think that this prevents a lot of specificity when it comes to posts. So, often I'll see a #showdev post that is also about JS, CSS, and React, but is really an advertisement for this independently developed product. Many other social platforms, which is what DEV truly is, have certain requirements for disclaiming sponsorships or advertisements that fall under the category of native advertising. I think a good thought experiment would be to explore expanding the number of tags allowed, OR having a reserved set of tags that can be used in combination with the normal custom tag list.
That way authors could be more specific with the intended audience for a post, rather than every post having the same set of tags, e.g. #showdev #js #web #design. This limitation leads to an imbalance of volume on popular tags, which I would assume makes it harder for tag moderators to help.
I can't think of any obvious solutions, but totally agree with all of your points. Quality of content has gone hugely downhill
I completely agree with you. A little while ago, I stopped reading Dev.to Digest because of the same reason.
I think you are right, there are too many "Top x extensions/frameworks"
Excellent points.
Oh man, I certainly feel for you.
A friend of mine recently advised using this platform for blogging. I was looking for a place where I could start doing some write-ups of my past and future experiences. Not all, but many of them, would be very technical and require weeks or even months of preparation. And after looking at the platform for just a week it appears that this kind of content doesn't fit here.
I don't think anyone would like their well prepared content to get lost behind a plethora of relatively low-quality overviews, success/failure stories, ads, etc. Moreover, this content would be very far from web-development and also would be of interest only to the more mature group of our profession.
For now it looks like only the least technical articles for broader audience could fit here well. And for any more sophisticated stuff I am still to find the right place.
As a JS developer I can relate that a quality is missing big time
โโ
I think that the voting and rating system is undervalued, the feed should show more relevant information according to interests and ratings
Not going to lie, I was hoping you'd put some personal branding on the post.
But yeah, this is absolutely happening.
I 100% agree with your thoughts.
These kind of articles are patronized because humans love entertainment, and will do anything to satisfy that desire -- even in software engineering.
Define "best".
Great post!
C'mon, let's say it clearly: most of the content you see on the homepage are repeating shit things
I agree with your thoughts.
After reading this article and refresh my feed, this article makes total sense to me ๐คฏ
AI: what better purpose for AI than to curate wheat from chaff.
AI.
More manual curation is indeed needed. Maybe daily editor's choice? With no mainstream article obviously.
Star wars...
Agree! Reddit, Stackoverflow, Hacknews, etc.. Unlike these sites, which are irreplaceable