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Discussion on: The Internet Lottery™ for content creators

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nestedsoftware profile image
Nested Software • Edited

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?

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moopet profile image
Ben Sinclair

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.