71–80 of 111 posts
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.t…
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> 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…
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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.
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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.
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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.
I agree - but the point was about quality, not learning your trade.
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 '…
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 getting started, and do find the results relevant pushing content on the margins further down the list.
Worse still, with Google's increased focus on natural language processing, their seeming approach of "what you're really asking is..." makes loose queries even more difficult. Definitionally the most common questions aren't edge cases, at least not the single one you're interested in.
After all these years, I think I need to retrain myself on how to Google (distinct keywords no longer cut it unless I have a sequence where I can look for an exact match), and recently started falling back to other search engines with some success.
Edit: grammar (believe it or not)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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?
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 '…
The issue is that the ranking stops working well for the minority of people who are in the advanced category.
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…
Same thing happened with Medium. Initially it had thoughtful content and once the platform became more popular, it also attracted worse content. Typical articles: How to build and Android app. 1. Learn android 2. Find and idea. 3. Build the app. Thanks for reading this. Follow me on Twatter etc.... They basically baited you to open the link with an interesting title and the content had no substance.
Back in the good old days, forums typically heavily restricted self-promotion (even more so when it’s for commercial gain). Constantly shilling for your own website/Twitter/etc would end up earning you a ban.
I don’t understand why these social media platforms don’t enforce the same. Not only will this discourage this kind of crap but it would also benefit them as it would avoid people driving traffic away from the site (or having to pay for a paid commercial plan in order to do so).