It would be nice if they would do something about the obvious corporate spam. Just today I check the latest articles feed and some company has posted nearly a dozen articles in a row that all read as templated advertisements with maybe a paragraph or two of semi-coherent text before the same spiel of advertising their company. And the kicker is, they aren't a software dev company and the articles have nothing to do with software development.
Not to mention the countless articles with no content other than a link to some website. It's one thing to have a low bar of entry so as to foster new devs, but there seems to be no bar at all.
There are five 'share' buttons on every article, but no 'report spam' button. That suggests to me that they don't really care how spammy the content is.
So my suggestions are:
Add a Report Spam button.
Flat out ban link only articles.
Flat out ban obvious advertising articles.
The internet isn't new, we have over a decade of experience showing that for-profit entities WILL abuse any and every system they can if it has the slightest chance of earning them a fraction of a penny, even to the detriment of the system. Either we put a stop to it now or we'll have to add devto to the long list of well intentioned projects that devolve into nothing more than a feed for ad spam.
Some subreddit have a pretty hard stance on self-promotion. Maybe that could inspire some necessary change here.
There was recently an 'okayish' article about "how to get stars on github" and, lo-and-behold, all the examples were from the author's own github page. Writing about "how to get github stars" to get github stars: how meta!
This half-hidden self-promotion bothers me and maybe should be against the rules. A discreet link to your own blog or github page is fine, of course.
Under the "..." menu there is a "Report Abuse" option (which should be available to everyone, not just community mods - but let me know if that's not the case).
Spam and link only articles fall under the "Abuse" umbrella since they are against the terms of use for DEV :)
Thanks for these insights and suggestions! We completely agree with you that outright advertising doesn't belong in articles. We even have the Listings section for ads of all kinds as a way for people to promote to/recruit from the DEV Community, and try to direct people to this as often as possible.
As @terabytetiger mentions, all users can report spam on any article by clicking the ... beneath the reaction icons. We encourage you to make full use of this tool to bring spam to the attention of the site admins.
We remove as much spam as we can each day, thanks to the watchful eyes of our community (and volunteer mods in particular), but the more reports we get the faster the clean-up is. Please feel free to report anything you're unsure about: even if we don't agree it's a valid report after review, there's no penalty to the OP or reporter. We genuinely welcome your spam reports!
I know I'm revivifying an ancient post here, but as someone who occasionally writes corporate content, I am 100% with you. Professionally speaking, if you can't present content that aligns with your company's goals in a way that leans more towards the user's needs than promotion, you just... shouldn't write it. It's hard to do so, which is why it's so frustrating seeing people not even try.
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It would be nice if they would do something about the obvious corporate spam. Just today I check the latest articles feed and some company has posted nearly a dozen articles in a row that all read as templated advertisements with maybe a paragraph or two of semi-coherent text before the same spiel of advertising their company. And the kicker is, they aren't a software dev company and the articles have nothing to do with software development.
Not to mention the countless articles with no content other than a link to some website. It's one thing to have a low bar of entry so as to foster new devs, but there seems to be no bar at all.
There are five 'share' buttons on every article, but no 'report spam' button. That suggests to me that they don't really care how spammy the content is.
So my suggestions are:
The internet isn't new, we have over a decade of experience showing that for-profit entities WILL abuse any and every system they can if it has the slightest chance of earning them a fraction of a penny, even to the detriment of the system. Either we put a stop to it now or we'll have to add devto to the long list of well intentioned projects that devolve into nothing more than a feed for ad spam.
Some subreddit have a pretty hard stance on self-promotion. Maybe that could inspire some necessary change here.
There was recently an 'okayish' article about "how to get stars on github" and, lo-and-behold, all the examples were from the author's own github page. Writing about "how to get github stars" to get github stars: how meta!
This half-hidden self-promotion bothers me and maybe should be against the rules. A discreet link to your own blog or github page is fine, of course.
Reminds me of the old truism in the 90s that the only way to make money from the internet was to write a book on how to make money from the internet.
Under the "..." menu there is a "Report Abuse" option (which should be available to everyone, not just community mods - but let me know if that's not the case).
Spam and link only articles fall under the "Abuse" umbrella since they are against the terms of use for DEV :)
Thanks for these insights and suggestions! We completely agree with you that outright advertising doesn't belong in articles. We even have the Listings section for ads of all kinds as a way for people to promote to/recruit from the DEV Community, and try to direct people to this as often as possible.
As @terabytetiger mentions, all users can report spam on any article by clicking the
...beneath the reaction icons. We encourage you to make full use of this tool to bring spam to the attention of the site admins.We remove as much spam as we can each day, thanks to the watchful eyes of our community (and volunteer mods in particular), but the more reports we get the faster the clean-up is. Please feel free to report anything you're unsure about: even if we don't agree it's a valid report after review, there's no penalty to the OP or reporter. We genuinely welcome your spam reports!
I know I'm revivifying an ancient post here, but as someone who occasionally writes corporate content, I am 100% with you. Professionally speaking, if you can't present content that aligns with your company's goals in a way that leans more towards the user's needs than promotion, you just... shouldn't write it. It's hard to do so, which is why it's so frustrating seeing people not even try.