There's one major drawback to a "feed-oriented" platform like DEV: posts have an incredibly short social lifespan. That is, posts drop out of the a...
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If I comment on a post that has substantially the same message - or a disagreement with - a post I've read before and can hunt down, then I sometimes reference that post in my comment.
In fact:
How should we handle duplicate content on dev.to?
Ben Sinclair ・ Jun 7 '18 ・ 1 min read
I'm conscious that people might take it as me criticising them for duplicating content, but I really mean it to help spread the discussion. If one post about, say, the Pythonic
isgarners a lot of interaction, while an existing one with more to say doesn't, then everyone's losing out.It's a social problem in that popular (heavily followed, veteran) people can have their posts read a lot more than newcomers simply because they pop up in more people's feeds, and in turn they get more clicky action.
It's a time-of-day problem for some as well, where people post at a time convenient for them that might not coincide with a lot of readers being online.
And it's a popularity problem, too. I'm sure you've seen it happen, where people who have a lot of regular readers post something run-of-the-mill like, "what's your favourite text editor?" that ends up dominating the feed because it's easy to answer, never mind that it's asked multiple times per day and most people don't get any response.
There's some luck involved, some momentum of popularity, and some algorithms that we can influence.
I like the idea of bumping. I like the idea of related posts.
Something I also like is that perhaps the related posts could be partially algorithmic and also partly influenced by moderators. Where you get to rate the experience level of a post or suggest a tweet, you could also get to suggest a related post. Curation of content could really work!
That "popularity bias" may actually lend itself to a further feature of bumping: if an author bumps a post, it's shared to his or her followers in the same manner as posting! That way, if I really like an article by a newcomer, and I bump it, it automatically shows up in the notification area for my 15K followers.
I suppose that would make bumping not entirely dissimilar to "retweets", but that seems like a good thing. New and less popular authors gets promoted, and old posts resurrected periodically. Continued activity — comments, hearts/unicorns, bumping — by other users would then have a juggernaut effect, increasing the reach of otherwise obscure posts via notifications, feed ranking, and organic sharing.
Stackoverflow wants to create a repository of knowledge, that's why they are so annoyingly eager to close as duplicate. But DEV seems more interested in building community and fostering discussion, so closing duplicate is indeed a bad fit here.
In a 'normal' social group if there is someone new to the group and bring up a topic that the regulars have already discussed multiple times, I think the group will entertain his question for some time, someone will point out the summary from past discussions, and most will not engage. So, um, just like what happens in DEV now :)
But yes, agree 100% with you, if the new person is actually looking for information instead of just want to strike up a conversation, a good search engine, 'similar to' widget, bumping etc will be very useful.
I think the best solution(s) depends on what we think is important for readers, as this problem isn't really that important for authors, as being made aware of duplicate content wont stop those that don't care, and you might already be aware of older posts as a reader.
The reason I say any solution should focus on the read is because there are always going to be more readers the authors, and expanding the platform relies more on getting more readers, with a few turning to authors than too many authors and only a few readers, as then things turn into a "shouting match".
I see the current feed as being focused on the new, at the cost of the old. Where newer articles are promoted over finding older articles. This incentives more "new" articles, cause more or less what we see today.
So the "dump solution" relies on authors being active in maintaining their posts (up to a point), before being "lost to the void" just like before. It will also incentives the most active posters that maintain their posts, which may or may not be good for the reader.
The feed could take the approach similar to a forum/Reddit where active posts are promoted higher, but this has the side-effect of inherently promoting topics that are more active and or "heated".
The feed could also take a more "active" approach in finding older content that is more relevant to the reader, but this requires the feed to know what the reader is interested in, and what topics they would want to read. (hello big data parsing or big $$$) It already kind of does that with "Another post you may like" features, and "classics" that are promoted on the bottom of the page in most cases.
Maybe the solution is as simple as leveraging existing promotions to older popular posts more heavily, or stronger "reader" filters?
Its an interesting question, without a simple answer that is for sure tho haha :)
I do agree with you that the quality of content on the main feed here is a little disappointing. A lot of repetitive articles.
I think any attempts to manufacture a 'good' feed are bound to end up in tragedy for the whole community. It's your job as the feed consumer to filter out things you aren't interested in, and it's the job of the website developer to give you the tools to do that effectively. To surface good content you either have to have a moderator that removes the bad content, or a curator that picks and presents good content. You can either have a person do that, or have the user to that. Both take work.
And, see, that's why I think the authors and readers literally should be a part of that process (ergo my two suggestions.) "Enforced" quality doesn't lend to true diversity or inclusiveness, but a lack of quality isn't much better. If we're all empowered to push quality material to the front, then that quality is according to the community as a whole. As it stands, it's more of a "visibility by default" thing.
Slightly unrelated, I often get people not fully reading my posts and racing down to the comments to post something off topic, is there a solution or should I just write better content 🤷♂️. That and spelling mistake corrections, I'm dyslexic, I don't actually feel it is all that important for the style of content I write, stream of consciousness posts.
I'm dyslexic too, but I find that spelling and grammar matters! For one, by leaving those in, you're making it harder for other readers, especially other users who are dyslexic, ESL, or have reading difficulties. Quality matters.
Proofreading need not be at odds with 'stream of consciousness'. You simply need to form the habit of fixing errors as you go. The LanguageTool add on can help with that.
Damn, your right, but still a "nice article but you made a mistake, I wouldnt mind that" usually it's quite a blunt comment.
Some (many?) people could stand to be more tactful, but at the risk of sounding like I'm excusing them (I'm not), we are programmers. Code has to be exact in spelling, grammar, and syntax, or it won't work as desired. Thus, proficiency with coding usually comes with a knee-jerk reaction towards typos and errors, a la code review "this is wrong. fix it."
I've never found a twitchier mob of English pedants than programmers, even compared to professional authors. Late nights of debugging have entrained us to fear errors, and even more, to distrust coders who regularly produce errors: "If you can't resolve a basic their/there/they're collision, how can I expect you to comprehend link resolution order?"
It's sound logic to be sure, but it could use more than a tablespoon of basic human decency to go along with it.
(P.S. If you, dear reader, are one of the folks ripping into people over typos, this isn't an excuse. Learn tact.)
Array methods ... Again and again and again. That's what's in my feed quite often. Jason I couldn't agree more, more like this would be a good idea.
DAE optional chaining?!
Maybe a button "not interested in Optional Channing" would solve all of this
Yep?
Well, the current voting features already cover things like that, although maybe we could add the improved "related" side-pane to the post itself, in addition to the compose page.
I wouldn't want to violate individual articles by "merging" however. For example, I'm working hard on my Dead Simple Python series, so I wouldn't want someone else to be able to mix in other content. If I want to cite another article myself, I can include the quote manually.
Like I said, the "dupe hammer" itself is dangerous here. It can quickly devolve into silencing one voice over another.
It's both valuable, bumping everything new as well as focusing on adding value and respecting the original posts. I think howerver, the strict uniqueness thing is some kind of flawed, which you can see on SO question like this: stackoverflow.com/questions/576732...
Allowing newcomers to write about the very same thing someone else wrote on their own journey before gives them at least the possibility to learn and reflect and the same time reach out to people and get honest feedback. So I am pro bumping :-)
Really great stuff, Jason. I actually had the same sort of complaint awhile back about this platform, and I even mentioned it as an issue on GitHub:
Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
This is mostly a selfish ask, but I think it would be cool if there was an option to discover older content. Right now, the main homepage allows you to sort content by latest and greatest, but there doesn't seem to be any opportunities for good content to shine if it never gets seen in the first place.
In other words, unless an article gets overwhelmingly popular, I feel like it sort of disappears into the void like an old Tweet. It would be nice if articles had an opportunity to resurface as they do take a lot longer to write than a Tweet.
Describe the solution you'd like
I know that dev.to displays related content under articles, but I think I'd be interested in a tab or widget that allowed you to discover older articles. For instance, GitHub has this little discover repositories section on the main dashboard. I don't know how it works (probably based on trending repos), but I'd love something like that as both a reader and an author—especially if those recommendations were based on your interests.
Describe alternatives you've considered
Honestly, I haven't thought a lot about how this would work, and I couldn't find any similar suggestions in the current list of issues. If anyone has any ideas, I'm welcome to them!
Additional context
Here's the GitHub feature I was referencing:
But, I never had a solution for it. I like some of your ideas!
I like the chaos of chronological posts, much like tumblr, but yes I agree there's a lot of duplicate content and I wish there were a feature to assist either better discoverability of pre-existing articles while still allowing for frequent opinion ones ("How I got into tech"/"My fave extensions") to be given space.
I would like to point out this community is much more friendly than stack overflow and I'd rather it remain so. I'm into the related-content idea, or even curated lists like on twitter.
Actually, I think ultimately a article must provide value and offer a unique perspective in another person's voice.
I'm assuming that you were referring to an article recommendation then I'm all for it.
But if it's putting every article of similar title together sounds really off putting to me.
Never said anything of the sort. I'm talking about showing similar content on the compose page so the author is aware of similar content before posting.
I'd be in favor of bumping within constraints like you mentioned, for #discuss or #watercooler posts. I don't think I'd be interested for articles though. For articles, it is already competitive to land above the fold on the home page. If "bumps" overwhelm the space, then it could be an even worse situation.
I suppose I'm generally alright with the existing situation, even all the duplicates, even the examples you mentioned, because I feel like software is inherently temporary. I think I always hear about new music from a "music I'm listening to while coding" article even if it's the hundredth article I've read like it.
There's got to be a way to keep bumped articles in balance with new articles, though. I feel like we need some solution to buried articles, especially those buried before their time. ;)
A possible suggestion:
A DEV.to post is not an un-referenced chunk of content. Rather, the conceit of a dev.to post is that it is really a join table entry, connecting a person with an idea that they had.
For example, there are well established UX models for single-entry canonical records: wikis, editorialized blogs, etc. Yet dev.to is none of these. In fact, I think you could you extend this argument into all social media: what matters is less the content specifically, and more the dialectic between a person with the content they made. While a wiki is anonymizing, dev.to is certainly not, much of the activity here is performant. We are interested in performances of knowing and idea-having and so we are compelled to re-write an article not because we have forgotten the original, but because we want to join ourselves to having-had-that-idea. Obviously imperfect, and increasingly routine.
This isn't all a bad thing, it certainly enables conversation and dialogue in a way that is designed out of wikis. The cost however, is profound performance, ersatz content, and diverse people and corporations using the platform to advertise their own agendas. As with all social media, the content is often less content-in-itself and instead a performance of content generation connected to the author's better or worse constructed cult of personality.
I'm all for the idea of bumping older posts. However, imho, there should be a limit to how often a post can be bumped; say once a month, at the most.
A couple of ideas, off the top of my head, on how to do it:
I feel like the sidebar section would defeat the purpose: it makes the most sense to me in the Feed — going to Latest wouldn't show bumped posts.
I like the idea of a tag, though, so people know it was bumped.
I was wondering about this too. Are there ideal times for posting that where there is generally more engagement? Or does it taking having a significant following, etc to get a chance at better engagement?
I'm trying to post more technical content, but it feels like it gets buried here.
Maybe I need to write more?
<marquee>with links to continue reading. xDWeb Design According To Ben, amirite?