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The collapsing quality of dev.to (2021)

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

#91

Post by AdrianB1 »

addicted wrote: post #66
AdrianB1 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No, it doesn’t. Unless you assume that only a certain group of people can put out quality articles. Which based simply on HN articles is obviously not true (even though some people may continue thinking it is due to their preconceived biases, based on how HN comments in articles written by women will invariably have multiple people refer to the author with male pronouns).

Read again the paragraph with the title "What could Dev.to do better?". It is exactly that: no downvotes or flagging of low quality content in the name of inclusivity.

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

#92

Post by lumenwrites »

Kovah wrote: post #74
AdrianB1 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?

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

#93

Post by aaaaaaaaaaab »

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.

That’s the beauty of it.

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

#94

Post by sshine »

phlummox wrote: post #90
sshine wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ll invite you. Just send me an email.

Might I email you as well? I'm a regular lobste.rs reader, but not yet a member.

Yes. You should just have gone ahead and emailed me, since now I have to respond both here and there. ;-)

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

#95

Post by nickjj »

I never understood how dev.to worked from an engagement perspective.

Back in 2018ish I mirror'd some of my blog posts from my personal site to dev.to. Within a few months I had over 7,000 followers by doing nothing other than copy a few posts there with canonical URLs pointing back to my domain. I never tried to gain a following there, all I did was mirror my own posts and answer any questions folks asked in the comments of those posts.

I'll admit I suck at Twitter but I've had an account there for 10 years and while I don't post a ton, I do at least try to tweet something every few days and I have about a third of the followers there as I do on dev.to current day. I don't know, it makes me think something doesn't line up. I have a hunch almost all of the followers I have on dev.to aren't humans because why would so many people follow me on a platform I don't post on much but on Twitter I'm lucky to get ~10 new followers a month? At the same time I've had a few direct chats with the co-founder of dev.to (Ben) over the years and he's a really genuine dude. I can't make sense of the situation. Maybe dev.to is really just super optimized for making it easy for someone to follow you?

As for content, I tend to only create posts and videos on things I encounter in my day to day from any topic related to developing and deploying web apps. That could be anything from using shellcheck's -x flag to live coding a pull request for a third party project. I find it difficult to build a readership with these styles of posts because it's usually some obscure thing I learned while actively working on something, not "10 reasons why XYZ sucks" or something that will get a lot of interaction or be heavily optimized for organic search. The posts are more to reflect on something I've learned so I don't really focus on "gaining an audience", but it would be nice to grow large enough to be able to make courses full time. The process of learning something new, using it in production for a while while understanding it in depth and then distilling that into a video is really fun to me.

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

#97

Post by pizza234 »

technion wrote: post #72
ignoramous wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thank you for this list. It's ironic that I've seen so many "Awesome.. curated" lists but this is the first one I really want to go through.

The few "awesome" (and "are we X yet") lists I've seen/contributed to were terrible; they have a very low barrier to entrance, and a very high barrier to exit - which made them nothing more than landfills, essentially. I think the valuable lists are personal ones.

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

#98

Post by addicted »

invalidname wrote: post #82
addicted wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. However, if one specific platform becomes the location where everyone is writing their beginner content, then even if the writers may benefit, the platform will suffer. Or at the very least, appear low quality to someone who is beyond beginner level.

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.

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

#99

Post by antifa »

pizza234 wrote: post #97
technion wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for this list. It's ironic that I've seen so many "Awesome.. curated" lists but this is the first one I really want to go through.

The few "awesome" (and "are we X yet") lists I've seen/contributed to were terrible; they have a very low barrier to entrance, and a very high barrier to exit - which made them nothing more than landfills, essentially. I think the valuable lists are personal ones.

I've had pretty good experiences with "awesome lists", usually if the topic is language or framework and I just want a concise list of mature things related to topic. Other examples I've personally enjoyed:

https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted

https://github.com/255kb/stack-on-a-budget

https://github.com/cloudcommunity/Cloud-Free-Tier-Comparison

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

#100

Post by antifa »

stingraycharles wrote: post #67
Varqu wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

HN is well known to have very “proactive” moderation, and as such kill low quality articles. As explained in this whole comment section, dev.to is almost entirely low-quality articles, and as such it’s not unexpected for HN to ban the site altogether.

I wish they would add Twitter to this list. Every tweet or "tweet thread" that's been posted has been incomprehensible to read and navigate beyond the actual title or first tweet.
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