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.
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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.