First things first: I'm not an Internet warrior. I do not wish to make Dev.to's judgment here nor am I trying to convince you that this platform is right or wrong.
Instead, I would like to warn people of a trend that is endangering the web as we know it.
TL;DR
I don't think Dev.to is a problem but how authors use it. Authors should not post their content only on dev.to. You should not publish content on Dev.to. You should share content on Dev.to.
"Actually, what's your problem with Dev.to ?"
Being an author for several years, I used to share articles on my personal blog. I was quickly confronted with an obvious problem. It is difficult to "make" a small personal blog live in a web world where social networks are taking up more and more space.
By publishing on my personal blog, I had a small audience. It was difficult for my articles to get passed my first level contacts range.
I was therefore quickly tempted to find a solution to remedy this visibility problem. The solution presented by one of my colleagues seemed attractive to me.
"Why don't you try the new Medium platform? Authors who publish on Medium have thousands of readers! Also, the editing interface is pretty cool!"
That's what I did. I stopped publishing on my personal blog and started writing and publishing my posts on Medium only. And do I regret it today.
And then unfortunately the story went wrong!
Medium, in only a few months, and following some business decisions, has really become a platform to avoid.
User tracking, advertising, a paywall, a real disgusting cocktail that would make "la quadrature du net" scream. Many people have decided to leave the platform as a result of these decisions.
I'm not saying Dev.to will suffer the same fate. I'm not a medium, I don't have the ability to see into the future. But in practice, Dev.to remains a company and thus is tied to financial issues. And the stability of Dev.to's Business Model is rather obscure.
You really have to trust the team so that Dev.to doesn't go in the wrong direction. I would very much like to hear Ben Halpern's opinion on this subject.
So we should stop writing on Dev.to ?
The answer is NO
Dev.to is great, and have an amazing community. But, authors should not post their blog content only on Dev.to.
We should follow the P.O.S.S.E principle.
Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere
Respecting it will help authors being and staying responsible of their publications on the Internet. This will:
- protect the web from hyper-centralization
- avoid having your copyrights stolen
- promote your blog
All authors should have their own personal blog where they publish the content. They can then share this content on other platforms by placing a canonical url pointing to their own blog page.
Dev.to has this feature, which is very rare. I would really like this feature to be highlighted so that the authors are aware of the problem.
For example, this post is available on my personal blog and its content is shared here on Dev.to.
I also worked on a project for an open source syndication platform named "Open Blog" in order to raise awareness about not being the owner of your content. If you liked this article, come take a look at it.
Top comments (8)
Hey, this is really on point, and we’ve been working on a lot of features to help people pull off POSSE in a simpler manner, while also trying to roadmap a future where trust is pretty clearly baked into our product.
Medium Was Never Meant to Be a Part of the Developer Ecosystem
Ben Halpern for The DEV Team ・ Jun 3 '19 ・ 5 min read
Project Benatar: Fending Off Data Black Holes
Ben Halpern for The DEV Team ・ Jun 17 '19 ・ 6 min read
I’m not sure if you’ve read those, and some of the other posts we’ve made on the subject, but let me know what you think!
Hi Ben ! Thanks for the answer 🙏
Yeah I saw that ! I was very happy to read that. I'm really looking forward to knowing what's going to be hidden under #projectbenatar
The destruction of the Alexandria library was one of the great tragedies of antiquity. The desire to gather and make as much knowledge as possible accessible remains utopian and dangerous.
Proposing an alternative so that everyone can build their own "library" is very interesting for the longevity of the dev.to project
I think you'll be super excited about our future plans.
We have some more #projuectbenatar stuff in the works right now, but we're narrowing in on the articulation of our general longterm plans. We want to be genuine enablers of an open, distributed web and it's going to be pretty sweet!
@slashgear_
I immensely enjoyed reading this article!
As someone who started on Medium and later moved to Dev Community before finally building a personal blog/portfolio (under construction) site using a domain I actually own and control, I have often wondered how to best approach SEO, canonical links, and most of all, the P.O.S.S.E. principle for my articles.
I do have a question, though, so perhaps you could give me some advice. Obviously the Medium articles belong in part to Medium. I can't change that. But what about my articles originally published on DEV Community?
Is there such a thing as second chances where canonicals are concerned? Can I "migrate" my existing content to my own domain and retroactively "reverse-syndicate", back to DEV? And even if I could, can you think of any negative implications where SEO is concerned?
I feel rather silly to ask this considering I have a good bit of dev/SEO experience, but I've never really tried to change a canonical across domains or encountered any situation where I needed to before now. 😅
@ben feel free to weigh in also; I feel that you may have some insider knowledge that is relevant, at least where DEV Community is concerned. 😎
Sorry for the rambling question and thanks in advance!
Good insights. After giving up the idea of using Medium, I almost started to just write my posts here on Dev.to. But this post changed my mind and made me start a personal blog instead.
Hi, did you shut down your open blog project or teh website is down?
I agree with you and I am doing the same! Thank you for sharing this 👏
Pretty simple, but interesting article, old but still gold.