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.
I think manual work can only last so long, it may be time to really work on some algorithms for the page feed to push some of the lower quality down. I don't come here as much as I used to for the same reason. I dont need {COUNT} of the best {X} resource everyday or how you can do a simple trivial task. I am all for people getting into writing but maybe there needs to be an approval, time limit, and quality posting before someone can hit the main page.
Hope to see some of great articles. Because I saw a lot of articles with many interactions or views, but they just list out some tools, extensions or projects everyone should do. As fresher, sometimes I don't know which one I should read or spend much time on instead of reading useless contents. Thank you
Maybe there should be some kind of special category for that kind of "articles". I totally agree, that most of the "loved" articles are just poor list of link to libraries, repos etc. It has nothing to do with self development and quality. Hope it will change soon, because finding something valuable here is ridiculously hard. Regards!
The only problem with manual curation is that it's subjective, however the "top articles" thing where the listicles very often get a lot of attention is ALSO subjective.
I would say that for the "top articles" post they might start de-emphasizing the listicles, and start promoting good solid content ... I just want to see more in depth "how to" articles, solid tutorials, that's what seems to be getting less and less on dev.to, or at least it's probably there but it just gets less visibility.
I prefer subjective rather than random. As an expert in a specific field (CSS in my case) I can easily identify good articles from no-sense-very-bad-useless article. I don't expect to select articles to be shown in the feed but rather have the ability to remove the bad ones.
I think they already do a good deal of manual curation, the really bad stuff doesn't make it onto the site obviously ... in case of questionable quality content maybe what they could do is indicate it by tagging/ranking, rather than removing it altogether - so, people can still view it of they want, it will just end up having a lower default "ranking" in people's streams ... I see better tagging/ranking and better (more extensive and fine-grained) filtering as the solution, or at least a large part of the solution.
not removing altogether, simply removing from the feed and still visible in the other tabs (like the latest). Also we already have a tool (as moderators) to rank some posts up or down but it's not enough against the bad posts that get a ton of reactions.
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.
I think manual work can only last so long, it may be time to really work on some algorithms for the page feed to push some of the lower quality down. I don't come here as much as I used to for the same reason. I dont need {COUNT} of the best {X} resource everyday or how you can do a simple trivial task. I am all for people getting into writing but maybe there needs to be an approval, time limit, and quality posting before someone can hit the main page.
Man, I feel you on this. And the irony is, nobody even goes through or uses those resources.
Btw, I remember your name. I've read article/stack answers of yours that have helped me quite a bit :). Thank you
Hope to see some of great articles. Because I saw a lot of articles with many interactions or views, but they just list out some tools, extensions or projects everyone should do. As fresher, sometimes I don't know which one I should read or spend much time on instead of reading useless contents. Thank you
Yeah lol way too many "listicles" :-)
Maybe there should be some kind of special category for that kind of "articles". I totally agree, that most of the "loved" articles are just poor list of link to libraries, repos etc. It has nothing to do with self development and quality. Hope it will change soon, because finding something valuable here is ridiculously hard. Regards!
There should be a mandatory #listicle tag that you can exclude if you want to!
It would be fine enough as well! :)
The only problem with manual curation is that it's subjective, however the "top articles" thing where the listicles very often get a lot of attention is ALSO subjective.
I would say that for the "top articles" post they might start de-emphasizing the listicles, and start promoting good solid content ... I just want to see more in depth "how to" articles, solid tutorials, that's what seems to be getting less and less on dev.to, or at least it's probably there but it just gets less visibility.
I prefer subjective rather than random. As an expert in a specific field (CSS in my case) I can easily identify good articles from no-sense-very-bad-useless article. I don't expect to select articles to be shown in the feed but rather have the ability to remove the bad ones.
I think they already do a good deal of manual curation, the really bad stuff doesn't make it onto the site obviously ... in case of questionable quality content maybe what they could do is indicate it by tagging/ranking, rather than removing it altogether - so, people can still view it of they want, it will just end up having a lower default "ranking" in people's streams ... I see better tagging/ranking and better (more extensive and fine-grained) filtering as the solution, or at least a large part of the solution.
not removing altogether, simply removing from the feed and still visible in the other tabs (like the latest). Also we already have a tool (as moderators) to rank some posts up or down but it's not enough against the bad posts that get a ton of reactions.
Yeah that's exactly what I meant :)