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The collapsing quality of dev.to (2021)

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Re: The collapsing quality of dev.to (2021)

#31

Post by invalidname »

mellosouls wrote: post #28
invalidname wrote: post #4

Dev.to does allow downvotes and blocking bad content. You need to become a moderator to do that. I'm such an external moderator and flagged a lot of abuse in the system. I've noticed an improvement in the past couple of months where I have less content to flag. So they probably improved their spam account detection. There's a lot of beginner content which is fine. Some marketing/SEO content which is to be expected. I…

There's a lot of beginner content which is fine. Well, not really. That's the point.

I disagree. That's a matter of opinion. I think this can be improved with the introduction of publications but they have their downside too.

The main reason I commented was the mistake related to downvoting and about spam.

Re: The collapsing quality of dev.to (2021)

#32

Post by ignoramous »

uxcolumbo wrote: post #16
onion2k wrote: post #10

The problem with dev.to, and pretty much every blogging platform like it, is that it encourages the mindset that the articles about problems you have yourself are the best articles to learn from, and that things that aren't directly applicable to other people won't get promoted. That leads people to think they should write boring, generic things about language fundamentals in order to become 'famous'. People end up r…

> The reality is that most interesting dev articles are about relatively unusual problems that a dev solved in an innovative way Do you have a list of those articles? And which sites do you visit to find those articles?

A few that come to mind:

Hosting SQLite databases on GitHub Pages or any static file hoster https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27016630

How to crawl a quarter billion webpages in 40 hours https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4367933

Writing an open source GPU driver without the hardware https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30107002

Teleforking a process onto a different computer https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22987747

How NAT traversal works https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30707711

BPF, XDP, Packet Filters, and UDP https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24848391

A viable solution for Python concurrency https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28880782

Updating the Go Memory Model https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27810459

zig-cc: A drop in replacement for gcc/clang https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22679138

Finite state machines as data structure for representing ordered sets and maps https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10551280

Time-lock encryption https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22061752

My first impressions of Web3 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29845208

How to build large scale end to end encrypted video calls https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29570938

Secure value recovery https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21838413

How Google code search worked https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18582469

Deploying authoritative DNS with Mirage Unikernels https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21868589

Playing around with Fuschia OS https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23466564

Making tokio scheduler 10x faster https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21249708

JVM Anatomy Quarks https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22190815

The hunt for a cluster-killer Erlang bug https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31746090

Static B Trees https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30376140

Files are hard https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10725859

Faster JavaScript calls https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26143648

Firefox's new compiler https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16169236

Abusing Linux's firewall: The hack that allowed us to build Spectrum https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16821807

Million packets per second ingress https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9726185

Streams: A general purpose data structure for Redis https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15384396

Let's build a compiler https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20444474

Improving compression with zstandard https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18719592

When bloom filters don't bloom https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22463979

Critbit trees https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6920862

Mobile physical memory security https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25505517

How the Linux kernel works https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14422605

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11467309 Following a select statement through postgres internals

LMAX https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3173993

ELF https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17114672

Reading privileged memory with side channels https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16065845

How fast are Linux pipes anyway https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31592934

Reverse engineering a mysterious UDP stream in my hotel https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11744518

io_uring examples https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23132549

Clojure design patterns https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15771561

Inside the Magic Pocket https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11645536

A high performance cache in Go https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21023949

Lockfree data structures https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7734202

mtime considered harmful https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18473744

Bracket colorization https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28692470

Linux load averages https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14959288

A bump in the wire to make your internet go faster https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17721496

Backblaze durability https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17550837

H.264 is magic https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12871403

Redbean: single file web server https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26271117

Gotchas from 2 years with Node https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9372303

Counting objects https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10259471

Idempotent APIs https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13707681

Norvig's auto correct https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42587

QuickJS https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20411154

...

Re: The collapsing quality of dev.to (2021)

#33

Post by mellosouls »

invalidname wrote: post #31
mellosouls wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lot of beginner content which is fine. Well, not really. That's the point.

I disagree. That's a matter of opinion. I think this can be improved with the introduction of publications but they have their downside too. The main reason I commented was the mistake related to downvoting and about spam.

It's not really a matter of opinion that beginner content will - by definition - not come with the experience to have the authority and originality that contribute to the quality of the writing.

Re: The collapsing quality of dev.to (2021)

#34

Post by Kwpolska »

coffeeblack wrote: post #14
simongray wrote: post #11

I think this will always be the case with these adtech platforms. There is a conflict of interest at play. In the end, the ad revenue always wins. The only way to really filter this stuff is through self-hosted blogs. These can also be connected, but in a decentralised way e.g. https://indieweb.org is a good intro to some of the protocols in use.

Substack seems to solve that pretty well. No ads because authors get paid by readers, yet articles are still viewable publicly.

Substack is a paid newsletter thing. Some Substack newsletters might have some publicly readable entries, but the user experience on Substack is geared heavily towards getting the thing in your e-mail and paying for it, not free reading on the web.

Re: The collapsing quality of dev.to (2021)

#35

Post by lumenwrites »

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?

Re: The collapsing quality of dev.to (2021)

#36

Post by Hallucinaut »

Merg wrote: post #22
uxcolumbo wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The reality is that most interesting dev articles are about relatively unusual problems that a dev solved in an innovative way Do you have a list of those articles? And which sites do you visit to find those articles?

Lobste.rs frankly. More programming oriented, less ego boosting.

How does one get an invite to join though? The suggestion seems to be to scroll through a list of hundreds of online handles to see if you know someone by their pseudonym, and assumes you can reach them out of band, which is obviously not going to work for the vast majority of people.

Re: The collapsing quality of dev.to (2021)

#38

Post by dredmorbius »

onion2k wrote: post #10

The problem with dev.to, and pretty much every blogging platform like it, is that it encourages the mindset that the articles about problems you have yourself are the best articles to learn from, and that things that aren't directly applicable to other people won't get promoted. That leads people to think they should write boring, generic things about language fundamentals in order to become 'famous'. People end up r…

Neither quality nor truth are popularity contests.

Re: The collapsing quality of dev.to (2021)

#39

Post by dredmorbius »

simongray wrote: post #12
minimaxir wrote: post #6

It's worth noting that it's a shadowbanned domain on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=dev.to

Where do you see this?

If you have over a small threshold of HN karma, you can enable "showdead" in your account settings.

dev.to submissions will appear as dead by default in the "New" queue. These may be vouched, though truth to tell, I don't bother.

"Dead" submissions won't appear in Algolia search.

Re: The collapsing quality of dev.to (2021)

#40

Post by dewey »

trentthethief wrote: post #21

I hate to say this but I feel like Dev had a nice start but went downhill fast. Nearly all articles can be boiled down to “Look at this really basic thing, and follow me on A, B and C. The first Dev talk I watched from the founder (Ben) was about how they gained a lot of traction being such a fast loading site, focus on content and less fluff. I loved the attention to performance, being open source and the customizat…

> However the site got funding and started to focus on “diversity” and “inclusion” at all costs. Created a new CoC and the beginner content flooded in and has gone downhill since.

I was with you until that sentence. Focusing on “diversity” and “inclusion” or having a Code of Conduct with values like "Being respectful of differing viewpoints and experiences" is most likely not the reason for a community going downhill or beginner content flooding in.

The more likely reason is that the community became too big, the fluff posts from Medium shifted to other platforms and them not having a solid system for curating and surfacing interesting and valuable posts.

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