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I post stuff on dev.to and am surprised to learn that many people on hn consider the entire site spam.

by CA0DA 5y ago

WnZ39p0Dgydaz1 5y ago
I don't think people consider the entire site spam. It's user-created content after all. But if 99% on a site is spam and your articles are not, you may want to consider posting them somewhere else, ideally your own blog, to avoid suffering from the site's bad reputation. The same goes for medium.com. There are good articles on Medium, but 95% of it is low-quality or spam, so I generally avoid these links or come in with the expectation that an article is likely spam.
- wdencker 5y ago
  Interesting observation. I wonder if these are issues intrinsic to the sites themselves, or if instead there’s some fundamental law that states once a publishing platform reaches a critical mass of popularity, it ceases to yield high-quality content (on average). I do wonder how Substack is thinking about this problem. They obviously have a different business model than Medium, but I think they are still susceptible to this issue.
ryansolid 5y ago
It's unfortunate because of all the platforms it is one that gets the most human interaction in terms of real thoughtful humans willing to discuss things. I've tried a lot of platforms and dev.to is the best as writer from this perspective. Medium has better stats but that is about it. It's super unfortunate that the best place to write is also the place most blocked. HN isn't the only one. Reddit also by default blocks dev.to. There are plenty of low quality articles on both sides. I think the moral of the story is that there is too much garbage out there and a computer algorithm is incapable of making the distinction. HN is fine risking being behind the curve if it saves it readers from wading through it. That's a fine tradeoff but means it leaves things on the table.
- quickthrower2 5y ago
  You can post the same article both to dev.to and your blog.
  - CA0DA 5y ago
    This is what I have been doing! I might think twice now.
- matt_s 5y ago
  I was turned off from the platform because there was a lot of low-effort, personal branding motivated content on there. Articles that are regurgitated help docs for example. Another example is nearly anything that is tagged #todayilearned. Too much noise, not enough signal.

I post stuff on dev.to and am surprised to learn that many people on hn consider the entire site spam.

by CA0DA 5y ago

I post stuff on dev.to and am surprised to learn that many people on hn consider the entire site spam.

I don't think people consider the entire site spam. It's user-created content after all. But if 99% on a site is spam and your articles are not, you may want to consider posting them somewhere else, ideally your own blog, to avoid suffering from the site's bad reputation. The same goes for medium.com. There are good articles on Medium, but 95% of it is low-quality or spam, so I generally avoid these links or come in with the expectation that an article is likely spam.

wdencker 5y ago
Interesting observation. I wonder if these are issues intrinsic to the sites themselves, or if instead there’s some fundamental law that states once a publishing platform reaches a critical mass of popularity, it ceases to yield high-quality content (on average). I do wonder how Substack is thinking about this problem. They obviously have a different business model than Medium, but I think they are still susceptible to this issue.

ryansolid 5y ago

It's unfortunate because of all the platforms it is one that gets the most human interaction in terms of real thoughtful humans willing to discuss things. I've tried a lot of platforms and dev.to is the best as writer from this perspective. Medium has better stats but that is about it. It's super unfortunate that the best place to write is also the place most blocked. HN isn't the only one. Reddit also by default blocks dev.to. There are plenty of low quality articles on both sides. I think the moral of the story is that there is too much garbage out there and a computer algorithm is incapable of making the distinction. HN is fine risking being behind the curve if it saves it readers from wading through it. That's a fine tradeoff but means it leaves things on the table.

quickthrower2 5y ago
You can post the same article both to dev.to and your blog.
- CA0DA 5y ago
  This is what I have been doing! I might think twice now.
matt_s 5y ago
I was turned off from the platform because there was a lot of low-effort, personal branding motivated content on there. Articles that are regurgitated help docs for example. Another example is nearly anything that is tagged #todayilearned. Too much noise, not enough signal.