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I agree with this a lot. At DEV we do things to try to make this right—we also do a lot of things that are more of the same in terms of what you've described.
This is an open conversation I'd love to have whenever possible. We've done a few things lately to make progress on this front.
I'm excited by some of the concepts you've laid out and articulated well.
I guess you're already facing the problem that all niches do -- you're growing out of your niche and becoming widely popular. This puts a huge strain on whatever algorithm you're using.
It's a difficult battle between showing people highly rated content, and ensuring the new content is exposed. You don't want to entrench currently popular authors, but at the same time, you do want readers to see quality content, especially from people they follow.
I've see a lot of different strategies, Medium, Reddit, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, they all take a different approach. I think about it a lot as well, and I don't know if I have a good solution. :/
It is up until the point where quantity of viewers comes into play. There's a tipping point where, no matter whose algorithm is running the show, popular users get more power to write low-quality content.
Once they reach a certain point, people will see them more often and upvote them regardless. And that compounds the problem because people have a finite attention span and don't have time to devote to other, potentially far more interesting content.
I've mentioned it before, but it's one of the things I like most about this place - if you see something in your feed (however it got there) you can't see how popular the author is, so there's much less of a bandwagon effect with following someone simply because they already have a ton of followers.
It's not perfect, and I'm sure that posts which already have a lot of little hearts next to them would do better than the exact same post without the signifiers, but it's a better balance than places like Twitter and Facebook and Quora and and and...
I totally agree with this. Also, I think there is a phenomenon in general where a piece of content can get popular without being particularly good: There are things that are easy to agree with, easy to like, and such content can get lots of upvotes, even if it doesn't have much substance.
Here on dev.to, if something is more technical, then only the people who really go through the thing and make the effort to confirm it makes sense are likely to upvote it, so by definition it will get fewer reactions than something general and immediately digestible. I think this is a particular challenge for a site like dev.to, where this could lead to good technical content getting swamped by click-baity titles and listicles.
I don't want to be mean, but I do find that there is more of the latter in my dev.to feed than I would personally like... It's a tough problem though. If you don't measure people's reactions, then what do you measure?
I find there're few enough click-baity titles here that whenever I see one it really jumps out at me. It's difficult what to do about it to discourage the practice though - a "downvote" option would probably be self-defeating in the long run and there's often nothing actually wrong with the articles themselves.
Ah yes, the sellout effect. If one becomes entrenched as a popular creator, it's possible to turnout more quantity at a lower quality. I believe YouTube has this problem. It's hard to begrudge those people as well -- once monetization is involved, it's understandable that people choose money over quality.
The bandwagon effect is really high on places like Instagram and Twitter. If you don't have followers, people won't follow you. I'm sure it happens here as well with likes.
Even without showing them though, using them to decide what is shown makes a big difference.
I kind of like how Netflix attempts to show a matching rating. Instead of absolute scores, a score relative to you personally. It hides the likes, but also keeps the content relevant -- well, maybe, based on my Netflix account it's horribly broken! :D
I have noticed a lot of my content go unnoticed until a key player retweets it. Then it blows up. If I don't reach those key people, then the engagement fizzles out.
If you don't reach a certain momentum in the beginning, then your content can fall onto the 2nd page and you'll never be able to crawl back out.
DEV.to has been good for me, tweeting out many of my articles. The effect is noticeable.
On medium, submitting to a publication like Hackernoon has helped my articles a lot as well. They would also be retweeted by @hackernoon.
If you don't get that retweet by someone with a large following, your article won't be successful.
This is one of the reason i have been hesitant to move my blog back to my joel.net domain. I don't have a good channel for syndication. I still may do it.
Cheers!
Yes, getting noticed by the "influencers" definitely helps in promotion. That's part of the lottery. They also only have so much time and cannot see everything that might interest them. As they become more influential the amount of content pitched to them increases.
Great article!
I joined DEV.to a couple of months ago and I’ve since realised you need to get your content to your target audience for it to be seen. Posting a link on twitter is just competing with so much other noise, but a site like DEV.to offers an audience of developers wanting to learn and read more about development.
Thank you for sharing this!
When I first started blogging many many years ago, it felt way more easier and I used to say that if you have quality content, the audience will eventually find you. But since social media started to be the default method of discovering new content, this started to not render true anymore. With the abundance of content and, more importantly, the advent of "digital influencers", it gets increasingly hard to create quality content because you know at the end of the day quality won't pose as such a big factor in "getting viral".
Whatever the outcome of this article's lottery ticket, you got my view, and I thoroughly enjoyed it!
I disagree Reddit is much of a lottery. Hacker News sure is.
The Reddit incentives forces you to participate in the community and post links from other people that may be useful to that community. Once you post a considerable amount of useful content, you get trust and therefore the community will be better inclined to read original content that you share.
There's still a trace of lottery in it. However, if you post a lot of interesting stuff your link will stay in the front page for a while, even with negative upvotes. If after that "while" your post falls into oblivion, then that's an indication your post was not a fit for that community in the first place.
If you're using Reddit for self promotion, you're doing it wrong.
Thank you
@mortoray , you might enjoy this (long) essay which really dives into the dynamics of social networks and "status" — eugenewei.com/blog/2019/2/19/statu...
Thank you. I'll try to read it when I have a chance... it's long. My brain keeps thinking: Wow, they could have broken that up and bought multiple lottery tickets. :D