Share on dev.to?

#question #meta #discuss

I'm currently building my blog (over at math2001.github.io if you're intersted), and I'm putting some link to share the current posts (twitter, etc).

And I was wondering if dev.to was an appropriate link to use... I'm quite new to this blazing fast website ( ðŸ˜ ), so, I was wondering: is dev.to only for sharing "new" content, or we can share existing stuff. I feel like the second option, but again, I'm new.

Basically, I'm asking if a link saying "Share on dev.to" would be appropriate.

What do you guys think?

Oldest comments (7)

Ben Halpern • Sep 26 '17

I'm pretty sure the answer is yes, but can you clarify exactly what you mean. I'm not totally sure I follow. Maybe just rephrasing could help.

Mathieu PATUREL • Sep 27 '17

Having a button Share on dev.to like we have a button share on twitter.

Ben Halpern • Sep 27 '17

Ah, interesting thought. We do natively support cross-posting. Some do it manually or via rss at dev.to/settings/publishing-from-rss

But this is another interesting thing to consider as we evolve what the platform "is". Thanks for the feedback.

Bobby Priambodo • Sep 27 '17

How would you see this implemented? What happens when you click that button?

I see two possible option:

1) Create a new post on dev.to which contain a link to your blog, or;
2) Repost the entirety of the blog on dev.to.

What "Share to [social media]" buttons does is 1, but I don't think that behavior is appropriate for dev.to as a platform (not sure though, Ben would know better).

Option 2 makes more sense, but I don't think it's actually "sharing".

Ben Halpern • Sep 27 '17

This is definitely the right line of thinking. I think for the typical behavior to work one expects from this, we'd need to make that behavior pattern of sharing links part of the site to begin with. I'm not uniformly opposed to this, but it's not a direction we'd go lightly because the benefits of crossposting to the site are big for the end user experience.

We'd like to make it easier to share more casually if it could be beneficial. Like if you want to tell people about a GitHub repo they should check out, you don't need a lengthy blog post, a quick. Hey, check this out. May suffice, and buttonizing it on GitHub (through a browser extension, unless they cooperated on the implementation, which is unlikely) makes sense.

Thanks for the feedback. I really enjoy these sorts of discussions.

Mathieu PATUREL • Sep 27 '17

Okay, thanks Bobby for making clear what I was trying to say! :+1:

In fact, what I was thinking was Bobby's first option.

So, I was wondering if there is a tag to specifically say it's a post linking to a resource (the kind of post Ben described). I mean a tag that act like the discuss on (I'm not sure there's anything really special, but the facts that it shows up in the title kind of makes "official"). I was thinking of something like resource.