The collapsing quality of dev.to (2021)

Post by invalidname » Sat, Jun 25, 2022, 3:09 PM UTC

addicted wrote: post #98

invalidname wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are several sites like this including Hashnode, medium, tealfeed, etc. They all suffer from the same problem. Medium solved this with publications. Others solved it by tagging, moderation etc. although that's not ideal either.

Yes. For all the frustrations with Stack Overflow, they actually do a pretty great job on the reader side. The site isn’t spammed by people posting the same stuff repeatedly. And you can find solutions of varying difficulty levels and quality. The problem for them is that makes it harder to contribute. Which may actually be an intrinsic part of resolving the excess of low quality items problem.

Post by minimaxir » Sat, Jun 25, 2022, 5:38 PM UTC

lumenwrites wrote: post #35

Kovah wrote: post #17

I have left Dev.to long ago after being one of the early adopters. The quality of articles is going down every time I visit the site. And this is absolutely not surprising: Dev.to encourages clickbait and low effort articles. Likes seem to be the thriving factor for pushing articles and you can even earn achievements for post with the most likes and views. A possible solution could be to ditch likes and view counts e…

Then how would you rank the articles, measure their quality, and choose what to put on the front page?

Post by doodlesdev » Sat, Jun 25, 2022, 7:52 PM UTC

lumenwrites wrote: post #92

Kovah wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like counts, be it likes alone or Reddit-style with downvotes, is the wrong mechanic for community-generated content, as it incentivises posting something "for a quick like". As explained in my other reply, Slashdot has a really healthy, decade-old community without having like counts. Posts are ranked by comment count and if there is something really bad, users can report it. It's that easy and it works.

Wouldn't comment counts incentivize controversy-inducing content instead?

Post by NylaTheWolf » Sun, Jun 26, 2022, 2:43 AM UTC

thfuran wrote: post #81

DavidSharff wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh if only the fallout stopped there. The proliferation of these sources have torpedoed my Google effectiveness. Not only do these sources amplify themselves, they are of near necessity targeted at simple use cases. The result? Google has ample popular material filled with my relevant keywords but void of any usefulness to anyone not just getting started. As it happens, the people with the most questions _are_ just g…

>unless I have a sequence where I can look for an exact match Google these days treats quoted strings as guidelines anyways.

Post by Yhippa » Sun, Jun 26, 2022, 1:30 PM UTC

rockbruno wrote: post #60

thecupisblue wrote: post #53

It's not just dev.to, it's most online developer content sources these days. A lot of people noticed that you can become 'famous' online which will gain you the ability to sell a course, earn from content or get better jobs and opportunities due to 'influence'. And it works especially good if you can find a new framework/language/platform that you can write content about, since there is less content and you can get '…

I think you hit the nail in the head here, and I'd also say that this is true for pretty much anything that is bloggable today (e.g financial advice, recipes, product reviews) and is a consequence of mass social media making people addicted to getting attention.