The collapsing quality of dev.to (2021) • Hacker News Board

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

#41

Post by brunooliv » Sat, Jun 25, 2022, 10:28 AM UTC

Dev.to simply is too focused on the open-source community and the web, it promotes and pushes up Javascript related content, presumably because a lot of the open-source repositories available on Github are JS or TS based.

It's not a true knowledge sharing platform, it's just a popularity platform where being the first to write about the new ANGULAR version 9999 is seen as a sign of great wisdom and being "on top of your game as a dev".

I wrote there a lot and stopped exactly due to the misalignment between what I wanted to consume and write about.

More generally, I find that ad-hoc aggregator websites like HN have a much higher hit ratio with my own interests. Also, if you're a professional developer actively involved in open-source and working within the JS/TS ecosystem you'll likely get a bit more value out of dev.to than I did, I guess it's just not my style...

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

#42

Post by Swizec » Sat, Jun 25, 2022, 10:29 AM UTC

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?

I’ve been putting my own on https://swizec.com/blog for over 10 years. About 15,000 people agree they’re good enough to stay subscribed.

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

#43

Post by uxcolumbo » Sat, Jun 25, 2022, 10:31 AM UTC

Swizec wrote: post #42

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?

I’ve been putting my own on https://swizec.com/blog for over 10 years. About 15,000 people agree they’re good enough to stay subscribed.

Already subscribed to yours ;) Good newsletter content.

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

#44

Post by uxcolumbo » Sat, Jun 25, 2022, 10:32 AM UTC

ignoramous wrote: post #32

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?

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…

This is great... thanks for sharing.

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

#45

Post by sshine » Sat, Jun 25, 2022, 10:32 AM UTC

Hallucinaut wrote: post #36

Merg wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’ll invite you.

Just send me an email.

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

#46

Post by oefrha » Sat, Jun 25, 2022, 10:37 AM UTC

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…

IMO these social blogging platforms for developers lowered the overall quality of online technical content by a lot, and made researching technical topics a fair bit harder.

It used to be that well-researched people and passionate people blogged about technical topics they knew very well, and when they blogged about unfamiliar topics they usually declared that upfront.

Nowadays there are an order of magnitude more grifters churning out a massive amount of blind-leading-the-blind garbage to "build a presence", and they usually pose as experts even though they barely know the topics. As an example, whenever I try to compare two similar technologies/libraries I'm not familiar with, I can almost always find one or more Medium or whatever articles on the topic, but 80+% of the time it's quite clear the author basically wrote the useless crap of an article after reading the READMEs, or slightly better, the bare minimum example projects.

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

#47

Post by AdrianB1 » Sat, Jun 25, 2022, 10:44 AM UTC

dewey wrote: post #40

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…

As the article is practically saying it, in order to be "inclusive" quality filtering does not exist. That makes quality nosedive, but it is inclusive - makes sense?

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

#48

Post by tapland » Sat, Jun 25, 2022, 10:49 AM UTC

ignoramous wrote: post #32

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?

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…

I instantly found things in your list that will solve issues with some side projects and allow me to get them up and running.

A big thanks

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

#49

Post by AdrianB1 » Sat, Jun 25, 2022, 10:53 AM 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?

The same way you check what you buy from an online store: by the number and content of the negative reviews or downvotes. But they don't exist here because inclusivity is wanted more than quality.

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

#50

Post by CJefferson » Sat, Jun 25, 2022, 10:56 AM UTC

oefrha wrote: post #46

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…

IMO these social blogging platforms for developers lowered the overall quality of online technical content by a lot, and made researching technical topics a fair bit harder. It used to be that well-researched people and passionate people blogged about technical topics they knew very well, and when they blogged about unfamiliar topics they usually declared that upfront. Nowadays there are an order of magnitude more gr…

This is a hard problem, and I'd love someone to solve it.

I was looking recently for some guides about Docker, as some parts were confusing me -- everything on the first couple of pages of Google was clearly just badly repeating the "getting started" guide, which I'd already read!