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.
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)
Google these days treats quoted strings as guidelines anyways.
The issue is that the ranking stops working well for the minority of people who are in the advanced category.
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.
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.
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!
The fact that they are generally crap is an orthogonal problem and one the author addresses pretty well IMO.
Do you have a list of those articles? And which sites do you visit to find those articles?
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=22987747
How NAT traversal works https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30707711
BPF, XDP, Packet Filters, and UDP https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24848391
A viable solution for Python concurrency https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28880782
Updating the Go Memory Model https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27810459
zig-cc: A drop in replacement for gcc/clang https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22679138
Finite state machines as data structure for representing ordered sets and maps https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10551280
Time-lock encryption https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22061752
My first impressions of Web3 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29845208
How to build large scale end to end encrypted video calls https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29570938
Secure value recovery https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21838413
How Google code search worked https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18582469
Deploying authoritative DNS with Mirage Unikernels https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21868589
Playing around with Fuschia OS https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23466564
Making tokio scheduler 10x faster https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21249708
JVM Anatomy Quarks https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22190815
The hunt for a cluster-killer Erlang bug https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31746090
Static B Trees https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30376140
Files are hard https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10725859
Faster JavaScript calls https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26143648
Firefox's new compiler https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16169236
Abusing Linux's firewall: The hack that allowed us to build Spectrum https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16821807
Million packets per second ingress https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9726185
Streams: A general purpose data structure for Redis https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15384396
Let's build a compiler https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20444474
Improving compression with zstandard https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18719592
When bloom filters don't bloom https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22463979
Critbit trees https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6920862
Mobile physical memory security https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25505517
How the Linux kernel works https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14422605
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11467309 Following a select statement through postgres internals
LMAX https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3173993
ELF https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17114672
Reading privileged memory with side channels https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16065845
How fast are Linux pipes anyway https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31592934
Reverse engineering a mysterious UDP stream in my hotel https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11744518
io_uring examples https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23132549
Clojure design patterns https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15771561
Inside the Magic Pocket https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11645536
A high performance cache in Go https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21023949
Lockfree data structures https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7734202
mtime considered harmful https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18473744
Bracket colorization https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28692470
Linux load averages https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14959288
A bump in the wire to make your internet go faster https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17721496
Backblaze durability https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17550837
H.264 is magic https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12871403
Redbean: single file web server https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26271117
Gotchas from 2 years with Node https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9372303
Counting objects https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10259471
Idempotent APIs https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13707681
Norvig's auto correct https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42587
QuickJS https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20411154
...
dev.to submissions will appear as dead by default in the "New" queue. These may be vouched, though truth to tell, I don't bother.
"Dead" submissions won't appear in Algolia search.
dev.to is also shadow banned on most developer subreddits and other news aggregators I know of.
Slashdot is around for like decades, a real internet antiquity, and made it without any likes or view counts. Posts that generate a lot of comments are ranked higher, as one can assume it generates more discourse. What else is really needed for a community? Isn't it about sharing knowledge and discussing it?
A front page, as you mentioned it, can consist of either posts that generate a lot of discourse. Or make it simple and just display the latest posts of the people you follow on it.
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.
The only way to really filter this stuff is through self-hosted blogs. These can also be connected, but in a decentralised way e.g. https://indieweb.org is a good intro to some of the protocols in use.
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.
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.
Wouldn't that hurt your articles ? Since there are multiple sites with the same content? Or if you have a blog, that would also drive traffic away from it, no?
Well, not really. That's the point.
The main reason I commented was the mistake related to downvoting and about spam.
Ran this for about 4 years before I called it a day earlier this year. Got busy with graduation and job searching! I do plan to start it again after I find a job and settle down :)
Feels like articles talking about the low energy of lightning. Impressive but too short to matter.
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.
twice for something I knew was there (some time before) and could not find it - instead some other 'articles' talking around the subject with no answer.
and a few times because search results brought it up higher than other sites which actual had the answer I was looking for.
Didn't this site takeover some resource, trying to remember, something like robottxt.org or something get bought or pushed into this thing?
Now I can't remember the one thing it was good for so long ago, and do not intend to return to have it confuse and waste time in the future, I'll always be looking further down the results.
and that reminded me, that's the thing that I had occasionally googled for a quick html5 starter template.. and that had gotten pushed into the web dev thing - and that I could not find that via links or searches.. (not robottxt that I mentioned above)
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.
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...
These days I primarily follow InfoQ, Habr, a few select individual bloggers, few larger company blogs and my feed has substantially improved.
I'm sure it's not all like that just like I know there are some great devs/writers who use dev.to.
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 customizations it enabled. Sounded great.
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.
There is also a rampant spam issue and affiliate link farming.
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 or beginner content flooding in.
The more likely reason is that the community became too big, the fluff posts from Medium shifted to other platforms and them not having a solid system for curating and surfacing interesting and valuable posts.
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).
Why not prioritize everyone’s safety over anyone’s comfort?
And the bit about “reverse -isms” is wholly ambiguous.
It screams to never invest one second of effort in the site.
A giant marginalized circle jerk.