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Cover image for My dev content feed is only 10% relevant. How do you hack it to 90%?
Renato Byrro
Renato Byrro

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My dev content feed is only 10% relevant. How do you hack it to 90%?

Software dev is certainly life-long learning journey. My Dev.to feed is usually only 10% relevant to my learning interests.

Same with Medium, HackerNoon, you name it... No one seem to have hit the jackpot in building a personalizable, relevant dev content feed.

How do you consume content? Especially, how do you hack into getting a relevant feed that matches your learning interests?

Cover image photo by Julius Drost on Unsplash

Top comments (9)

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vip3rousmango profile image
Al Romano • Edited

Feed aggregator (social media, news, RSS, youtube, etc...) -> Feedly.

I have 30+ sources for tech, dev and other interests all consolidated into Feedly.

This way I don't go looking for the info, it all comes to me and then I quickly vet it into things I'll read now and things I'll read later.

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byrro profile image
Renato Byrro

Hey, thank you for the Feedly suggestion! I used it few years ago, restored my account and added some dev sources there.

In this first try out, I had an even worse experience. It seems to rank by "popularity" or "freshness". None of these metrics are directly correlated to my interests.

How is your experience, how do you get it to prioritize what's really relevant to you?

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olivvv profile image
olivvv

Following more people is not going to increase quality...
I experience the same thing as Renato, my twitter feed is now around 2% relevant content, the rest is crap...
I think somebody should do to feed what stackoverflow has done to forum...
We need not more content, but better content, better editing

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byrro profile image
Renato Byrro

Exactly. There are tons of good content out there, but I feel it's difficult to get to them, I'm overwhelmed with so much useless stuff.

I'm not demeaning what people post, the relevancy is subjective. It might be great for someone else...

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ssimontis profile image
Scott Simontis

Follow more people! I believe that is the biggest scoring factor in what shows up in your feed.

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byrro profile image
Renato Byrro

Hi Scott, thanks for commenting!

My experience is the intersection between my interests and those of another developer can vary a lot, from 5% to 90%. If the overlap is low (5%, 10%) and I follow him after reading a nice post, he/she will occasionally publish other stuff that is relevant to me, but most of the times not.

That's the issue I see with following more people...

How is your experience? Is your feed mostly relevant by following more people? I mean, do you actually open and read most articles in your feed or do you need to browse a lot to find something interesting?

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ssimontis profile image
Scott Simontis

I would say that in general there are a lot more front-end focused articles versus back-end. You also tend to see a lot of Javascript frameworks and popular OSS languages.

Sometimes I am more selective than others when it comes to choosing content. I'm kind of over front-end development right now. Actually, I'm just kind of over everything right now. A succession of painfully meaningless jobs has really killed my spark and I dread working now and don't see that changing anytime soon. My current situation seems like a really creative hell for something absolutely terrible I must have done...I keep hoping I'll find something to bring the spark back, but no dice.

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byrro profile image
Renato Byrro

Got it! You're more open and actually willing to consume a more varied set of topics. Makes total sense, and explains why a diversified feed meets your current expectations.

I trust you'll find the path back to your spark again! Wish you the best

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davidmm1707 profile image
David MMπŸ‘¨πŸ»β€πŸ’»

Instead of following more people, follow the appropriate people.