Hey DEV!
Today, it finally happened. I hit 20,000 followers!
I'm very happy to have made it this far in my DEV journey and can't thank you enough for going on the journey with me.

This post won't be very long, since I can't think of a lot to put in it… besides thank you, of course! Huge thanks to all of you for tirelessly reading my articles, starring my GitHub repos, and especially giving feedback on my posts!

Besides that, I'll just write about a few things I've learned. I also made a special page on my website that you will see at the bottom of this post.

What I've learned

Listicles, junk content, and bad clickbait is popular

Popular does not mean good! Just by looking around on DEV, it's pretty easy to tell that bad clickbait and FOMO posts are popular. I've posted a bit about this (with an amusingly clickbaity title):

🚨 🚀 25 Reasons (You MUST Know!!) Why *Some* “Listicles” Are BAD for dev.to 🤯 👿 🚨

Best Codes ・ Dec 11 '23

#webdev #sad #help #javascript

This reality makes it hard for people who just want to create quality content.

Don't give in! Just keep making good content, since your focus should be to make high-quality posts, not have a high follower count. I can't promise anything, but if you stick to it, chances are you will get some followers along the way!

Consistency is key

If you don't create bad clickbait, you've got to combine many good things to beat the popularity of it! One of these things is consistency.

On DEV, you can have consistency in a couple of ways:

• Posting frequency. Try to post at a certain rate, so your followers know what to expect. Don't spam them with posts every hour, and don't make them wait 3 months for your next post! (I am admittedly bad at this sometimes 😂)
• Quality of content. Set a standard for your posts (I'll research it well, I'll fact-check anything AI tells me, etc.) and follow that standard.

It's good to have consistent quality content, but consistently posting about the same topic will usually bore your audience, so be careful!

Good clickbait exists

You may have noticed that I often say 'bad clickbait'. I do this to make a distinction between good and bad clickbait.

The definition of clickbait is “content whose main purpose is to attract attention and encourage visitors to click on a link to a particular web page.”

We all want people to click on our links! Clickbait become a bad thing when titles or cover images lie or promise things that they don't give. A title like This tool enhanced my productivity 10x! is probably better than This tool will change your life forever!.

Don't post AI-written content

I know a lot of you won't like this, but hear me out!

I generally take a favorable stance toward AI, AI tools, etc., so let me clarify something:

Using AI for spelling or grammar checking and sometimes writing content is okay. The problem is when you use AI to generate an entire article, especially when you don't even try to verify that what the AI said is true, not outdated, and not misleading or heavily biased.

The purpose of writing is human communication. The purpose of coding is machine communication. AI can both code and write, making it extremely useful for programming. However, AI written content intended for humans, not computers, is a different matter.

Humans have an expectation that written content is written by another human, and AI generated writing violates this expectation.
AI just predicts the next token; it's random chance. As a Christian, I believe that humans are created in the image of God, not by random chance. Humans can be creative, emotional, personal, and many other things that AI can't be. That's why human content feels more meaningful.

Well, there are a lot of other things I could write but decided not to. I added the #discuss tag to this post because I want discussion and feedback!

Feel free to tell me about your DEV journey, opinions on AI, clickbait, and whatever else you want to talk about in the comments!

Thanks for reading!
BestCodes