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The collapsing quality of dev.to (2021)

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

#51

Post by AdrianB1 »

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…

Restricting downvotes to moderators only is not effective. Also creating an environment where blind are leading the blind is not a good thing and the article is pointing to that.

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

#52

Post by skilled »

Dev.to is suffering from the same problem that sites like Hacker Noon and Quora have already accepted as their faith. For the time being, Google is still treating Dev.to with quite generous "authority", so I imagine their organic traffic is through the roof.

But this has consequences of having your site infested with spammers, poorly written promotional content, etc. For example, one of the things you can do on Dev.to is publish an article, and then add a Canonical link to the original article (your website), which is what a lot of people do.

Having said that, you can find some great articles on the site from people who simply use Dev.to as their preferred blogging platform of choice. Though, even at a glance, the ratio of good and poorly written articles is probably around 25/75 which isn't all that great.

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

#53

Post by thecupisblue »

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 'famous' faster.

And as such, it has become an endless race of trading off content quality for eyeball quantity - people write bullshit blog posts and ask silly or provocative questions on twitter that are easy to engage with, thus gaming the algorithms and getting more eyeballs on their content.

Then, in a nice little reference loop from hell, the 'lower ranked' influencers will like and share this content, leave comments such as 'Omg great article!' not because it is good, but because they know that by engaging with another creator with 'more influence' they can get more eyeballs on their content, making the creator think 'hey this gets eyeballs' so they create more content like that. And then others will copy what works for the 'higher ranked' influencers, thus creating a stream of similar content which the 'lower ranked' influencers will copy from and so on and so on. With so many cyclic references and no garbage collection, all we are left with is garbage itself.

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

#54

Post by layer8 »

CJefferson wrote: post #50
oefrha wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Blogging platforms that make it easier to publish and to be discoverable contribute to the problem just by making it easier to publish and to be discoverable. When writing a blog meant writing your own HTML, or at least installing and configuring some blogging software, and you’d have to write content other people linked to get a good page rank for your website, that served as a filter for low-quality content.

I’m not advocating to abolish blogging platforms, but they’ve been a double-edged sword in that way.

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

#55

Post by Varqu »

searchableguy wrote: post #13
simongray wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where do you see this?

You can ask HN moderators. There is no public list. dev.to is also shadow banned on most developer subreddits and other news aggregators I know of.

Wow, any explanation from the HN mods why this happens?

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

#56

Post by darkerside »

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…

This is totally a function of the experience level of the reader. When I was a beginner/intermediate dev, I was actively seeking out articles about the basics in everyday language from different people so I could grok the language. I'm much more comfortable going straight to documentation now, but there is absolutely a place for beginner explanatory blog posts.

The fact that they are generally crap is an orthogonal problem and one the author addresses pretty well IMO.

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

#57

Post by invalidname »

mellosouls wrote: post #33
invalidname wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

People need to start writing somewhere. The fact that they get visibility relates to upvotes and lack of publications. They also have advantages in communicating with other beginners.

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

#58

Post by invalidname »

AdrianB1 wrote: post #51
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…

Restricting downvotes to moderators only is not effective. Also creating an environment where blind are leading the blind is not a good thing and the article is pointing to that.

Let me ask you this: How would someone become "sighted"?

What filter can you use to discover the next great writer?

How can someone practice enough to become good?

That's the idea of these sites. People might have limitations but they can build them up. The voting system works but has problems. The alternative is often worse, individual silos, social network noise, etc.

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

#59

Post by mcintyre1994 »

cultofmetatron wrote: post #2

the real problem is that beginner oriented content is whats in top demand. I've written some advanced articles in the past on how to use more obscure locks and stored procedures in postgres in the past. it paled in popularity compared to random javascript content that only newbies wouldn't know. people are voting. just not for anything substantive.

That’s definitely tricky. When I have an issue like that, Google it, and find an article like you’re talking about, that’s awesome and I’m always so happy that someone took the time to write it. But I’m probably not going to read it until I need it, and if I did I probably wouldn’t have the context to appreciate it.

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

#60

Post by rockbruno »

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.
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