The collapsing quality of dev.to (2021)

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.

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. It's still a better experience overall when compared to medium. Right now only dev.to and hashnode are significant unmoderated alternatives to medium (there are smaller players like tealfeed etc.). Both are doing a better job than medium and I blog on all of them.

If they add "publications" which is the editorialized capability of medium they would solve the segmented content problem but that might make their monetization harder.

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

I'm very glad that others are observing this as well. My last DEV post was literally the question of where I should hang out with possible future content to discuss on a more intermediate level.

It's great that beginners can start by diving into DEV but at some point you're just not a beginner anymore but because of all the noise your only option is to move on. Even if you put your 'experience level' to expert the relevant content shown in the DEV feed is for beginners. I think 'fostering a community for experienced developers' is really the only way for DEV if it wants to move beyond 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 rewriting the language docs in their own words. How dull.

The reality is that most interesting dev articles are about relatively unusual problems that a dev solved in an innovative way. You can learn a lot about dev work from those (approaching problems, thinking about things, some cornercase dev tools, algorithms, etc) even if you can't cut and paste code from them into your own project. This exposes a further problem though - you can't write those articles until you're sufficiently experienced to face those problems, and knowledgeable enough to solve them. If you're a new dev starting out with ambitions to be a 'thought leader' and wanting to get to the top fast, you're bound to end up writing another "Why Array.pop is the best array method ever!" article.