I totally agree with you. I see a lot of great content underrated and lost behind the "200 Awesome resources that will make you the best developer" articles. I also don't understand why people love such articles too much (they get a ton of reaction immediately).

As a moderator here, I tend to mark them as "low quality" but it seems not enough. I suggest to have more manual work.

• The feed should be curated and selected manually. I know there is a lot of articles each day but if each tag moderator handle a tag, it can be an easy work. It would be good to have a kind of "kick this article" button that allow us to simply remove it from the feed (while still visible on the other tabs). Of course, and to avoid any kind of abuse, such action should be tracked and some kind of notifications are sent to the team to make sure the action was legit and that article doesn't deserve to be in the feed.

• Stop the automatic badges, the ones given each week to the top author (CSS, JS, react, etc). From what I noticed, it's only based on the number of reactions and since the low quality "listicles" are getting a ton they will earn that badge easily which will encourage them (and the others) to do the same to earn the badge (the gamification system). The "Top 7 posts" is a great idea because manually picking 7 good articles will encourage great content and will stop the bad gamification. All the badges should be like that IMO. Why not adding more of them, like "Top of the month", "best of the year", etc We can even have a new tab called "editor picks" where we put interesting articles hand picked by the team or the stuff.

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Thanks for expressing your perspective in a thoughtful and thought-provoking manner here, @samuelfaure !

As a DEV team member and one of this community's moderators, I'm watching this comments section keenly for suggestions on how we can keep the community inclusive and welcoming for devs of all levels and stages of their career, while continuing to foster constructive and relevant content for members who are further along their journey.

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I am waiting to see a top 10 list of top 10 lists of vs code extensions.

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It would be nice if they would do something about the obvious corporate spam. Just today I check the latest articles feed and some company has posted nearly a dozen articles in a row that all read as templated advertisements with maybe a paragraph or two of semi-coherent text before the same spiel of advertising their company. And the kicker is, they aren't a software dev company and the articles have nothing to do with software development.

Not to mention the countless articles with no content other than a link to some website. It's one thing to have a low bar of entry so as to foster new devs, but there seems to be no bar at all.

There are five 'share' buttons on every article, but no 'report spam' button. That suggests to me that they don't really care how spammy the content is.

So my suggestions are:

1. Add a Report Spam button.
2. Flat out ban link only articles.
3. Flat out ban obvious advertising articles.

The internet isn't new, we have over a decade of experience showing that for-profit entities WILL abuse any and every system they can if it has the slightest chance of earning them a fraction of a penny, even to the detriment of the system. Either we put a stop to it now or we'll have to add devto to the long list of well intentioned projects that devolve into nothing more than a feed for ad spam.

I've personally had similar thoughts about the content on the site. I'd love to see more variation in content and especially content that dives deeper into technical topics - like one of the most interesting articles I read was someone working on a bootloader and VGA driver. I have anti-follow tags across a variety of topics but that only works on well-tagged articles.

Regarding the experience level of content, I know in the settings there is a value to "nudge" the content you see to a particular experience level. Perhaps that needs to be more aggressive and maybe automatically detecting content experience level. Content of all experience levels should be welcome, just the audience for that content should be in control of what they see.

With low quality listicles - it is hard because on one hand, there likely are people that love to know about the best 5 VS Code extensions in 2021. I know DEV is aware of this type of stuff and are looking into ways to improve the feed. Again it is probably more a case to allow the content but give control to who wants to see it.

I think with measures that give control to the reader of what content they see, there might end up being less incentive to produce lower quality articles or just rehashing the same concept for the 100th time (less views, less reactions etc).

For me the home feed quality has gotten so bad that I don't even use it. I've kinda just ended up only using DEV to share my own content than browse the content of others. I only find out about new articles on DEV when they're shared by people I follow on Twitter.

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I think what this really boils down to is working out what content you, as the user, wants to see and how Dev can better filter out things of no interest.

As you've mentioned there are lots of top 10 lists, which don't really interest me either but are really popular, so some people out there must like them. We'd be remiss to blanket ban people from writing articles like that.

Something I imagine could be done is making it more clear at the time of posting that people can set an experience level for their post and also have experience level more heavily impact what is seen.

On the topic of junior devs making lots of posts. Before I was a dev I was writing posts on Dev and without them I wouldn't be a dev now. Honestly they weren't that interesting but they gave me purpose. The few people that came back and read them each week and left comments gave me the confidence I needed to change career.

The way I see it Dev is a resource, a way to share information. You can share that information by posting a post or by helping someone who's learning in the comments of their post and I don't mind doing that.

That all being said I would agree that post quality is dipping, as you rightly say, this because there are now lots of people on the platform but I'm not really sure raising the bar of entry is the solution.

As I said earlier better feed curation would be my preference, maybe things like this

• a see less like this option
• enforced experience level
• filter by like rate (views to likes ratio)

Another solution that might work, this is a half baked idea that came to me as I typed so it might not go anywhere. There could be a "following only" feed which only shows posts from people you follow (just like a twitter feed). Users could then endorse posts, when they endorse a post it would be like a retweet, you see who endorsed it and it would be on your feed.

This would be a new sort of feed and the old feeds could still exist as "Discover" feeds. I imagine if you don't follow very many people it could show you posts from people that are similar (with a message saying similar to Tom Jones).

I have to agree, and I think this was a really good, insightful writeup. I've found myself less engaged with this community over time, and I think a lot of it has been because I'm finding less and less genuinely useful / informative articles on here. The solution is, unfortunately, far less easy to define than the problem.

I wonder if there could be benefit in some kind of "Blog Writing 101" type resource that dev.to could offer? I know when I was just starting out, I wanted to write, but a lot of what I was seeing were those kinds of low-effort listicle type articles. Many people learn by emulating what's around them, and I definitely wrote a lot of that kind of stuff, too, just trying to figure out how this whole "blog writing" thing worked. It took me some time to move past that stage and into finding my own voice and style. I wonder if there's some guidance we could offer folks who fall into that "junior fullstack javascript developer fresh out of bootcamp" category that could help them identify good opportunities for content and generally level up their writing. I think a lot of them are genuinely trying to create good content, but simply don't have the knowledge / resources and are just imitating the other articles that they're seeing here – and reinforcing that kind of loop even more.

In writing circles, there's a strong community of "beta readers" who work with authors to help offer feedback and review their writing before a story gets shared. Maybe dev.to could offer some kind of author / beta reader pairing system for new folks looking to get another set of eyes on their work before it's posted? Like being able to open a PR on your blog article, haha :)

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I've been regularly browsing dev.to for the last two years and everything you've said rings true. It used to be that most of the articles in my feed were pretty interesting and well written, right now I often struggle to find ones that provide value.

This article has my compassion. I love the platform, but it is really hard to discover articles which I would like to read. A solid recommendation system is what this platform is lacking: everything else is just perfect. I do not care how many low-quality posts are out there if I don't get to see them in my feed.

I like what Kathryn had to say about providing resources to teach authors how to write better content

dev.to/kathryngrayson/comment/1g423

Here's the first technical blog post I ever wrote, way back in 2012
seangwright.me/blog/development/ob...

It's not very good at all!

There were two problems with that post:

1. I was a junior developer and didn't understand what I was writing about.
2. I was an inexperienced author and didn't understand how to write an informative blog post.

However, I'm still glad I wrote something because it set me down the path to where I am now, writing dozens of blog posts a year, speaking at conferences, and representing a developer community.

We definitely do not want to institute any gatekeeping here!

For many developers writing on DEV, English might be their second or third language. They are, as has been noted, junior developers, and maybe just don't know how to author a well written post about software development.

Instead, if we want to improve the quality of the content, let's do something foster writing talents!

Maybe those in the community with more writing experience could create some videos that walk others through the writing and editing process. They could explain what types of contributions bring value to the community.

I've noticed a lot of posts that have trouble formatting their content with code fencing, structuring paragraphs, and really just telling a coherent story.

These are things that can be taught and I feel many would be receptive to this type of content.

I'd love anyone's thoughts or feedback on these ideas.

From my point of view

Okay, some points is true and I have the same feeling as @samuelfaure .

Precisely, the "Junior fullstack javascript developer fresh out of bootcamp".

I see most of DEV posts around JS/React and HTML/CSS, I'm into that but I appreciate read/learn others stuffs like languages, culture of devs or wathever with good content. No links to 'Read more at' or just a embed with the code source and nothing more...

Even the little contents of people who start to learn a language I'm happy to read, so maybe it's not the most interesting topic of my comment, but if you who read this start to learn something and you want to share it, do so! Don't be afraid! It's a great way to learn more, to get feedback which is always nice, and nobody eats here (Si?)

The proof, my very first post here was when I started learning Ruby, it's still online and my very first comments are golden nuggets.

Second part, I'm agreed :

5 Top VSCode extensions"

I totally agree with that, I see most of the time on the homepage this kind of posts, and for some people they like it, but after a while it becomes boring and it makes you less interested in reading the articles on the homepage

StackOverflow and DEV

Why did you add StackOverflow as a shortcut? Usually people don't take the time to write down their problem and just copy and paste as many tags as possible. I find that it stains the platform. Help should always be part of it, but just throwing in a StackOverflow link and putting the same title again... might as well write "Read me more at [link]".

If you don't know what I mean, when you share on StackOverflow, you can create a post here, very easily.

I was speaking to you as a DEV member. What follows is about the moderation part.

It's almost the same, I moderate some tags and I see from time to time empty posts, here just to signal and mark its presence on DEV. I'm often wondering if I should downvote the post to make it less prominent or just report it as spam/nothing to do here.

I have forgotten some points, I am aware, but I would like to share some points that I think are right.

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Tbh most of my articles are niche articles. Yes I do use the beginner tag for my articles. I think the mods for that tag has their work cut out for them. Which i appreciate their effort as I used it from time to time that they remove the tag 😅.

I think in terms of curator of the top articles. I believe it might be better for tag mods to recommend articles of their own respective tags. Where as the higher amount of non-affiliated mobs can vote for the best by taking turns each week.

I'm one of those non-tag affiliated mods so I kind of like the idea there is more discussion on and voting for the best top 7 articles.

I think the problem as an author is that to produce some actually interesting content takes a long time, but your content is buried under a pile of repetitive content very quickly - even if it is significantly rated. Addressing the home page sorting and including algorithm might help with that.

It would need to address highly rated content per tag not per post I'd guess as commentary pieces have immediate appeal and tend to garner very high votes whereas technical content tends to have a slower burn but potentially higher value.

I know I feel lucky when I drop in and get to read something that makes me say "aha". You have to be here often for that to happen though given the sheer volume of the aforementioned content.

I use feedly and if I passed 1 day without checking dev.to I have new 200 entries... WTF !!!

Lastly I am evaluating remove it because simply is not possible with that all noise.

This hit the spot. How about semi-adopting Stackoverflow's suggestion mechanism?
For example- blogger wants to create a post about "How to use Docker", and while typing the title, DEV.to can suggest:

"There are 237648327642876 posts about how to get started with Docker, are you sure you want to add another one?"

@ben - what do you think? :)

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Totally with you on this. I am tired of seeing articles like "10 BEST React libraries" and "5 Github projects every developer MUST know!". It is frustrating. There is no quality there. These are just lists. Literally. Thank you for writing this post.

At the risk of sounding extreme, perhaps what's needed here is a clean break.

• dev.to for beginner content and listicles
• a new, more moderated ('curated'?) site for niche/advanced/"artisanal" (ugh.. sorry) content. codeart.community is available

Working as a dev advocate, this site is one of the places I go to work: promoting interesting tutorials and ideas that will appeal to people. As such its vagaries are quite fascinating to me: that beginner content is dominant isn't that surprising considering that the tech industry is trying to double in size in the next five years, but other stuff is more surprising like the heavy weighting on recent posts. Anything from last month feels invisible. It's almost a hybrid of Twitter and Medium, with content going stale quite fest. That contributes to a sort of 'treadmill' feel where a 'beginner's guide to GitHub' gets to the top of the charts almost every week.

I find that Dev encourages a blend of content. Everything from short punchy discussion questions, to longer tutorials, to beginner's tips. No one content type is dominant and that feels about right.

One of the questions not addressed here is how you handle the fact that communities often calve off into sub-boards, and Dev's tagging system doesn't really allow for that. There's no way to say definitively "I only want to talk about Java running on AWS, and I don't want to read any Javascript at all" (It turns out you can mute tags per Michael's advice by giving a negative weighting on 'my tags')

I would say that human effort plays a huge part in the general vibes of Dev, and it's helped enormously: you'll note that 'a beginner's guide to Git' is no longer the #1 article in the digest... every week.

This article brings up some thoughts that have been nesting in my head for awhile. I joined in 2018 and back then I felt the community was much closer nit and a higher percentage of articles were of quality. This could just be confirmation bias of course. However, I think there are far too many redundant articles.

As far as solutions I have some loose ideas that could be refined. First and foremost do not add any negative user reactions: dislikes, mark as duplicate, etc. Humans have a tendency to focus on negative emotions so adding user moderation via negation focused tools would promote poor behavior. So we have the unicorn reaction, which I assume is for uniqueness, which we could allow users to sort by. Promoting people to mark articles as unique and interesting would be an excellent way user moderation. Another idea is to allow people to tag articles to help increase relevancy.

Just a bit of food for thought.

Excellent points made in the article and the comments. Personally, I avoid anything where the title contains a number, exclamation marks or a superlative ("amazing", "awesome" etc) or the "what I did in school today" posts from students of a certain coding school that seem to have flooded the web recently that are rarely much more complex than how to turn the computer on.

Having said that, if there was closer moderation, I wouldn't want it to be like on Stack Overflow where you get told off or deleted for not wording something in the correct way or putting your answer in the wrong box. I gave up posting there a few years ago as moderators tended to be censorious rather than helpful to newbies. I don't know if it has improved.

To me, the problems you describe are not necessarily related to dev.to, but more to the industry and the Internet at large.

1. The over-representation of a type of development: there is a big "trend effect" in IT, leading people to admire and advocate some type of tools depending of the season.
2. Low quality content: it's the problem on Internet in general. If everybody love low quality content, it's because people like easy stuff in general. If it's a list it's even better. Difficult to change that.
3. Advertisement. Well, there is two sorts of them: the articles which really bring a lot of value with some plugs, and the ones which bring nothing but some plugs. These two are not on the same level I think.

You can moderate, remove, and ban, but the root problems will stay the same. Dev.to is not positioned on a "High quality platform where people speak about diverse tech without any ad", it's more the contrary to me actually. Everybody can speak about everything related to IT. And, to be honest, it's nice, especially when you see other platforms which try to sensor everything with nonsensical algorithms.

I agree. I wrote a few articles near the beginning which garnered a lot of attention. I spoke from my own heart. I wasn't really trying to anything like advertise. Some of my posts got hazed because they were poor quality. I respected that. Some of my posts got lots of good feedback because I tried really hard.

I offered to help out with development and other things related to the site. Nothing but silence.

Now the site has become something different and I have zero interest in writing anything further here. It's shifted to something negative and I barely check here anymore.

I love what everyone has done with DEV and I think it had an awesome start. I think it can be that once more. It's just not that right now.

My first take as I read the comments.
There should be a "list" tag where all the "best 5 toys that enhance your dev powers" should be stashed. And this tag should not appear in the feed.
That way, mods have it easy. When they see such an article, they just tag is as a "list" and boom.

Writing a good article is hard and takes time. Sadly, the front-page seems stuck with the eternal same "5 Top VSCode extensions" or yet another guide to React hooks. Were the previous guides so bad that the internet needed yet another?

I agree with this. But, I also wrote these kinds of articles. For example, these are the posts on Dev;

Top VSCode extensions

I didn't mean these articles shouldn't be here. But I can't see new technologies anymore as in the past.

Very thoughtful article - I've had pretty much these same thoughts and feelings about dev.to for quite a long time, and now I see them put into words - this is spot on!

Been a dev.to reader/follower almost from the start (yes, I'm also a defector from Medium!), and I can say that in the beginning the site definitely had a different "feel" - there was a lot more quality over quantity, you hardly saw "listicles", a lot less self promotion ... more interesting content I would say, and also more of a community feeling.

I think this is the inevitable consequence of growth, you definitely can't blame dev.to - and the funny thing is that this is something only we "veterans" will notice - people who discovered the site recently will be blissfully unaware.

And yes, there's a heavy focus on junior devs, people entering the profession, but that's something that I can't take issue with - I acknowledge that it's important for the whole industry that we bring people on board, for a long time we've complained about shortages and about being unable to get good people, so I see this surge in bootcamps and all that as something that was long overdue, and inevitable.

The "solution", assuming that we need one, would probably be better categorization and filtering - people should be able to filter their feed more effectively. You wanna read more about Ruby, Rails, PHP and so on? Indicate it in your preferences. More advanced materials, fewer "listicles", fewer short and simple articles (React Hooks Intro anyone?) - check it in your filter settings.

I'm not really in favor of "curating" upfront too heavily, although outright "spam" (I've seen posts that had nothing to do with dev and were nothing more than company advertisements) should of course be nuked, and I think that already happens. But we probably shouldn't take this too far, I think the platform or the site should remain low barrier to entry.

So, better and more extensive categorization and filtering is what I would bet on.

I would say that I agree with this 100%. I get the email digests and for a while, probably at least all of 2021 so far, I haven't opened but maybe a handful of links to articles -- this being one of them.

The content isn't all that pertinent to me unfortunately. I recognize that I could contribute some -- and have intended to for a long time. I haven't had as much time to read as I would like -- and unfortunately for writing, reading is better for me in terms of where I am professionally.

For a long time now "listicles" and similar style content has been quite frankly, mostly just garbage akin to blogspam. It would probably would be best of they were banned -- or relegated to a corner somewhere.

@afif / @ellativity Given you two are moderators, maybe this suggestion is best directed toward you instead of the ether -- maybe you can share it somewhere it would gain traction.

I think I agree with @samuelfaure 'successful' content needs to be de-emphasized. Or at a minimum limit how much JavaScript gets focus. There is much more to development than JavaScript, et al. The only way to encourage different content is going to be to promote it.

I think human curation and multiple "interest topics" subscription options -- have an entry level focused digest and more for other/advanced topics.

Dev.to desperately needs categorization and taxonomy. If it had this then you could create newsletters with more curated content. That of course has more limited use if all of the content is primarily for "Junior Bootcamp Dev" level.

I'll do my part by trying to work up some "higher level" content to share -- but as of yet I haven't been inspired :D

I see some of what you mean - the relentless “Top X for Y” is prominent and always gets included in the roundup emails and front page... as if there was some kind of algorithm driving it. I know that there is not — there are people behind the decisions for which articles to feature, and their focus at present appears to be to uplift and promote the new starters. I applaud this, but it leads to the selection effect we're seeing.

On the other hand, I am mindful of the outrage in computer magazines of the 1990s when HyperCard became popular, and the developers then bemoaned the uprising of “cookie cutter spaghetti card stacks, cobbled together by amateurs&rdquo. That's totally the wrong mindset, and glaringly backwards-looking with the hindsight of the game Myst (made by non-programmers), and the Web, which exploded only a few years later.

So my take is really that:

• More experienced developers, from fields other than the web platform, need to be encouraged as much as up-and-comers have been
• There needs to be more variety in the kinds of content featured by the DEV.to team

The first drives the second, though. So we need to get cracking on posts.

I'm guilty too: I've been lurking here for a couple years with no posts and only the occasional comment.

I can't think of any obvious solutions, but totally agree with all of your points. Quality of content has gone hugely downhill

The catered towards the "Junior fullstack javascript developer fresh out of bootcamp" is exactly what I have been feeling as well. Maybe dev.to will end up as "the stepping stone on your path towards more advanced knowledge".

I agree, and this discouraged me from engaging further. I visit 1x every couple weeks, and find the general content to be low-effort vapid posts, sort of a buzz feed for programmers.

Thanks for such a great post and articulating the issue so that it's well received.

I think there are a couple overarching issues: one is aesthetic (almost cultural) , and the other is technical.

The technical one is less controversial. I don't think dev.to is training their inventory ranking model on the right features. Most likely they are using follower count, like count and other trivial engagement signals to up-rank posts. This favors palatable but unsophisticated content.

Then there is the aesthetic concern of being an inclusive site, where no posts are down-ranked by moderators. With that model, you're not going to encourage sophisticated, complicated, challenging or niche content to get exposure. You'll also have a snowball effect where trivial content is getting up-ranked by the model above.

Why does this matter? Eventually beginners need to be challenged to become something more. So they will either get bored and leave, or stay and milk the likes in a busy loop.

But engineering is supposed to be challenging, quirky, niche. We're supposed to be innovative and controversial. Re-building todo apps in some new JS framework will not make the world any better. We need real creativity & innovation.