[oefrha]

IMO these social blogging platforms for developers lowered the overall quality of online technical content by a lot, and made researching technical topics a fair bit harder.

It used to be that well-researched people and passionate people blogged about technical topics they knew very well, and when they blogged about unfamiliar topics they usually declared that upfront.

Nowadays there are an order of magnitude more grifters churning out a massive amount of blind-leading-the-blind garbage to "build a presence", and they usually pose as experts even though they barely know the topics. As an example, whenever I try to compare two similar technologies/libraries I'm not familiar with, I can almost always find one or more Medium or whatever articles on the topic, but 80+% of the time it's quite clear the author basically wrote the useless crap of an article after reading the READMEs, or slightly better, the bare minimum example projects.

[CJefferson]

This is a hard problem, and I'd love someone to solve it.

I was looking recently for some guides about Docker, as some parts were confusing me -- everything on the first couple of pages of Google was clearly just badly repeating the "getting started" guide, which I'd already read!

[layer8]

Blogging platforms that make it easier to publish and to be discoverable contribute to the problem just by making it easier to publish and to be discoverable. When writing a blog meant writing your own HTML, or at least installing and configuring some blogging software, and you’d have to write content other people linked to get a good page rank for your website, that served as a filter for low-quality content.

I’m not advocating to abolish blogging platforms, but they’ve been a double-edged sword in that way.