Here's a bit of a rant, from thoughts over the last month or so.
I am getting worn down by the repetition of blog topics, especially on dev.to. Th...
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When I first started writing [cough] years ago, I looked at popular blogs and articles and noticed there were Top 10 lists everywhere, so I emulated them until I got comfortable writing my own pieces. Of course, "Top x" lists never went away, but they dissipated as more people wrote informed articles or personal thoughts on a particular topic. Then, at the top of 2020, Vulture posted an article where they ranked every Oscar movie:
vulture.com/article/best-oscar-win...
Pretty quickly, it seemed like all the entertainment blogs started emulating Vulture's newfound love of the listicle. Then lockdowns started, where the "49 [not 50] most anticipated shows coming to Netflix" and the "25 shows you must binge before they disappear from Amazon Prime" became super popular with consumers hungry for content.
Just as millions decided to learn how to make sourdough, countless others decided to learn to code, or their employer decided to jump feet first into more modern software development tools, frameworks, web services, eschewing the concept that everything they developed had to be in SharePoint, C#, or SQL Server.
I witnessed this phenomenon as many of my clients I would refer to as "old school". Suddenly they began adopting Git, Kubernetes, and other technologies that were -- and frankly still are -- a mystery to many of them. So with this massive migration, I think listicles found their way from mainstream entertainment to mainstream technology as well. I cannot tell you how many people reach out to me asking the themes and extensions I find most useful in VS Code. It gets me thinking I should write an article about how to think about themes and extensions, rather than list my top ten (I will have to put that on the to-do list).
Thinking back to my first writing, where I emulated the popular "top 10" approach to writing, I believe people are trying to grow an audience, and these are good clickable articles. Chances are the same people making these lists will be writing thoughtful articles later in their career, but with listicles having their moment, I suppose we will have to wait for it. Listicles are useful. I actually read a few recently about no-code solutions and checked them out, and it sent me down a rabbit hole to check out what people are using and what is to come. That said, if you are reading this comment and you are writing listicles only, know that sharing a personal story is what builds your career and engages people to collaborate with you. That advice comes from someone who built a career around building customers through engaging content.
I absolutely love Dev.to and Medium over other sites because people tend to share their stories. There are many great "I built this amazing app, and here is how I did it," or "How I learned to build an AI robot," or whatever the topic is. Going to the home page for a quick perusal every day seems to showcase those articles more than the listicles. In October of last year, I created a list of sites I like to visit and added them to my browser favorites. I go to the site's home page once a day/every few days, and if there is nothing of interest, I move on. The RSS feeds I used to rely upon became far too much for me to handle and kept distracting me because of the issues you document, like too many listicles. If I can recommend one thing, it is to peruse the first few top posts and move on, which is at least what works for me :-)
Okay, Unsplash images. I get it, I really do! My own website, which I wrote myself, was an exciting journey. What was not an exciting journey was to find images I can use. I have access to Adobe's Stock library, and there are so many resources out there. Unfortunately, Unsplash is way too easy, and there are no (or far less) concerns about usage rights and all the things that come with licensing images for a corporate entity. When I write a piece that I really want to call out, I do look for something special, even if on Unsplash, and I recommend others consider that approach as well. Here is an example that I am told got me lots of views simply because the image got their attention:
linkedin.com/pulse/tell-me-somethi...
Nearly every time I go to a GitHub repo, I see the same NPM package dependencies, the same boring readme files, and the same folder structure. It gets me thinking; maybe images are the same for people who put their creativity to use in other places?
Yes it sounds possible that listicles came from something outside like in entertainment.
Yes experience with tools and personal stories is what I like about the posts here. More relatable than tutorials and lists.
I like your idea of a post on how to make a good listicle without being cliché. One tip I am thinking of is to make it themed or specialized. As with any product in marketing, the audience may be smaller but appeal will be greater and it will be differentiated from the boring ones.
Such as top X extensions for React development. Or productivity. Or DevOps.
Even if there are only 3 extensions on the list, if they fit together as a toolset for a job role then they will resonate.
Maybe you can cover what a good number for a listicle is. Like maybe 20 items should be in two top 10 lists and they are logically grouped. There is some psychology I have heard before on choosing multiples of 10 or 5. Maybe going against that like 49 tells people already you're going to be unique but in familiar format.
It’s probably the same psychology stores use to price products: buy one, get two free, now only $49.99. You feel like you are investing less, but it’s exactly the point where your brain says it’s okay to spend the money.
In our case, we are just talking about where your are spending your time reading. I never thought of it that way until now.
Anywho, I’ll probably write that article when I get a chance, because it could be a fun little piece to write without being derogatory.
I actually make includes and layout files in Jekyll to help me focus on YAML data that gets turned into a listicle
github.com/MichaelCurrin/dev-resou...
YAML data github.com/MichaelCurrin/dev-resou...
Result
michaelcurrin.github.io/dev-resour...
And my blog
github.com/MichaelCurrin/coding-bl...
github.com/MichaelCurrin/coding-bl...
michaelcurrin.github.io/coding-blo...
That's a cool idea!
I discovered this podcast series.
They have a 45min interview on tech topics.
And they also list out with links all the tech in the podcast. In order.
dev.to/codenewbie/s14-e5-what-is-t...
This is great if you want to learn more about a tool or company or website. And they are in context of a personal story and career. And its hard to say spell something correctly if you only hear it in audio
Or maybe you want to scan the list to see what the podcast is about.
Cool, thanks! I’ll check it out. Love me some podcasts :)
I find myself rushing through image choice so I can get my image out. So I should slow down.
I do put attention into a careful choice though.
If I go for the obvious searches like developer or code. The images are either ones I've actually seen in use before or the images are just unremarkable stock. Some are more flashy or conceptual which I like.
Somethings I go more abstract like "build" or "developing" or "tool" or "create".
I also fave the other images I see so I can use them in future.
I find horizontal images with space for text place on them work well. Putting your blog title and a React / JS icon etc. takes more effort but makes the banner unique and grabs my interest. And I'd probably be more forgiving of the use of a common image.
People choose the same layout for docs and websites and similar NPM packages because they have discovered a pattern or convention used by others that works for them too. And makes their software easy to follow because it is familiar. It is more functional than artistic choice (but you can play with images and badges and alignment in your readme to make it unique or at least not boring). When it comes to images, I guess it is just easy to choose a predictable image that is safe and people will understand and like immediately. And if they don't have the effort or skill to be more creative with an image choice they will fallback to an easy choice and move on. Maybe I've just got a memory for images and annoyance with repetition and others don't know or care about a repeated image. Or they are forgiving (how do I know if the person discovered dev.to yesterday or 5 years ago and whether they had chance to absorb what images others are "taken" by other posts). Then again, maybe someone will skip over a post that looks unoriginal in title and image. Same with any product that looks like a copycat logo and doesn't give you differentiated value in the first impression.
I don’t think you are the only one. I see it frequently myself and sometimes when I go to my own website I think about how I should change the images. I know others are using them, so I’m sure people that visit my little site see that. It sends a “this looks like another...” message to your brain, but I think it’s hard now to find images that work unless you are using vectors, which can sometimes look a little odd, especially for a professional post/site.
This is a hard one, But personally I’m trying to train myself to ignore it, probably because I am doing what everyone else is :). I’ll update my site when I get some slow time though.
Thanks for the LinkedIn post
A striking image example and I'm interested to read it based on the title and the title fits with the image
I totally agree, there is a lot of repetition. The one I have started getting annoyed about is the "Intro to functional programming in Javascript", which basically covers immutability and map/filter/reduce, often using emojis.
"best vscode extensions" bothers me as well. I do love vscode and I love useful extensions, I have found several good ones through those posts, but like 90% of the time all listed extensions are for javascript/webdev. Webdev in general is a huge part of dev.to. Which is a bit unfortunate for people like me who are not into webdev.
I also get bothered my excessive use of emojis and gifs. I have seen someone had this complaint in their comments as gifs being too distracting and they removed some.
I get that the tone is light rather than serious but it seems too casual or informal for technical writing.
I do like unexpected posts. Like this one saying you don't need that VS Code extension and this is how to use the builtin feature.
dev.to/robole/vs-code-you-don-t-ne...
I've been disabling or removing extensions in general as it slows down my IDE on startup and in the git pane.
Someone told me in a comment that when you edit the topics you follow on dev.to you can set negative weighting for topics. Try a low or negative value for topics like webdev or javascript
Cool thanks. It looks like it works because the tag "anti-follow" appeared next to JavaScript haha.