Accessibility First DevRel. I focus on ensuring content created, events held and company assets are as accessible as possible, for as many people as possible.
It will be interesting to see whether this works, I hope it does.
Being the cynic that I am I think this is the wrong move, however.
While reaction farming is a big problem every site faces, the reduced relevance of votes and comments will have a side effect,
Posts that are high quality, but from lesser known authors will not get the boost they deserve if people find their article useful and upvote it and comment to show their support.
The problem (as I see it) is the tag system and always has been as far as I can tell.
If you write an article just add the #javascript tag and you will double your views for example. Albeit a mod may come and remove the tag but I have gamed the system by adding a JS example that doesn't add much to the article just so I can include the tag and it worked.
That is where I would reduce the relevance.
As for tackling farming reactions, having a hidden system that decides whether or not to count a vote for the algorithm, based on account age or some other factor, would be great.
So you have a public likes counter and then you have a separate one for the algorithm that only counts votes and comments that are from accounts xxxx days older or with a total of yyyy votes.
Don't get me wrong, I have seen some big improvements in the feed since moderators seemed to have been more involved and some of the experiments you have run have been great.
The only other thing that would be interesting to run an experiment on would be "DEV picks".
Similar to the "Top 7 posts" weekly update but actually incorporated into the feed (increased visibility and longevity perhaps?) so there is a place we can see posts that have been hand picked by the dev team and the mods. These are likely to be very high quality and hopefully quite diverse in nature.
Anyway those are my 2 cents and I am always impressed by the work the team at FOREM and DEV do to try and always improve. ❤🦄
Just to make sure I understand you correctly (you know, I am still rather new here 😉), when tagging a post with JavaScript, you will double the views because there are a lot of people following this tag. Correct? I do see how people can abuse the tags and hence reduce the relevance here. This is going to be an interesting problem to solve.
I have also gathered your suggestions on feed experimentation here for review at a later time.
Thanks so much for the write-up! I love your candid feedback.
Accessibility First DevRel. I focus on ensuring content created, events held and company assets are as accessible as possible, for as many people as possible.
But the problem isn’t abusing the tags as such it is more that you have to abuse the tags if you want to get an article to show up enough to get traction (if that makes sense?)
I Love the steps the team are taking, I don’t envy you all as trying to solve biases and abuse in a feed is not an easy task! ❤️
Ah. I see. This is one of the discovery problems we are facing for less known tags (i.e. with fewer followers), similar to new authors having a hard time getting their posts surfaced, albeit of high quality.
Thanks for the extra context. It helps me see what problems you are facing with the feed as an author. 🥰
Accessibility First DevRel. I focus on ensuring content created, events held and company assets are as accessible as possible, for as many people as possible.
All I have to say now is welcome to DEV and as your first 2 official posts / features these are great (despite the criticism! 🤣) and super positive steps!
I look forward to seeing what you tackle next / the outcome of this feed experiment! ❤
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It will be interesting to see whether this works, I hope it does.
Being the cynic that I am I think this is the wrong move, however.
While reaction farming is a big problem every site faces, the reduced relevance of votes and comments will have a side effect,
Posts that are high quality, but from lesser known authors will not get the boost they deserve if people find their article useful and upvote it and comment to show their support.
The problem (as I see it) is the tag system and always has been as far as I can tell.
If you write an article just add the #javascript tag and you will double your views for example. Albeit a mod may come and remove the tag but I have gamed the system by adding a JS example that doesn't add much to the article just so I can include the tag and it worked.
That is where I would reduce the relevance.
As for tackling farming reactions, having a hidden system that decides whether or not to count a vote for the algorithm, based on account age or some other factor, would be great.
So you have a public likes counter and then you have a separate one for the algorithm that only counts votes and comments that are from accounts xxxx days older or with a total of yyyy votes.
Don't get me wrong, I have seen some big improvements in the feed since moderators seemed to have been more involved and some of the experiments you have run have been great.
The only other thing that would be interesting to run an experiment on would be "DEV picks".
Similar to the "Top 7 posts" weekly update but actually incorporated into the feed (increased visibility and longevity perhaps?) so there is a place we can see posts that have been hand picked by the dev team and the mods. These are likely to be very high quality and hopefully quite diverse in nature.
Anyway those are my 2 cents and I am always impressed by the work the team at FOREM and DEV do to try and always improve. ❤🦄
Just to make sure I understand you correctly (you know, I am still rather new here 😉), when tagging a post with
JavaScript, you will double the views because there are a lot of people following this tag. Correct? I do see how people can abuse the tags and hence reduce the relevance here. This is going to be an interesting problem to solve.I have also gathered your suggestions on feed experimentation here for review at a later time.
Thanks so much for the write-up! I love your candid feedback.
Yes that is correct.
But the problem isn’t abusing the tags as such it is more that you have to abuse the tags if you want to get an article to show up enough to get traction (if that makes sense?)
I Love the steps the team are taking, I don’t envy you all as trying to solve biases and abuse in a feed is not an easy task! ❤️
Ah. I see. This is one of the discovery problems we are facing for less known tags (i.e. with fewer followers), similar to new authors having a hard time getting their posts surfaced, albeit of high quality.
Thanks for the extra context. It helps me see what problems you are facing with the feed as an author. 🥰
All I have to say now is welcome to DEV and as your first 2 official posts / features these are great (despite the criticism! 🤣) and super positive steps!
I look forward to seeing what you tackle next / the outcome of this feed experiment! ❤