[thecupisblue]

It's not just dev.to, it's most online developer content sources these days.

A lot of people noticed that you can become 'famous' online which will gain you the ability to sell a course, earn from content or get better jobs and opportunities due to 'influence'. And it works especially good if you can find a new framework/language/platform that you can write content about, since there is less content and you can get 'famous' faster.

And as such, it has become an endless race of trading off content quality for eyeball quantity - people write bullshit blog posts and ask silly or provocative questions on twitter that are easy to engage with, thus gaming the algorithms and getting more eyeballs on their content.

Then, in a nice little reference loop from hell, the 'lower ranked' influencers will like and share this content, leave comments such as 'Omg great article!' not because it is good, but because they know that by engaging with another creator with 'more influence' they can get more eyeballs on their content, making the creator think 'hey this gets eyeballs' so they create more content like that. And then others will copy what works for the 'higher ranked' influencers, thus creating a stream of similar content which the 'lower ranked' influencers will copy from and so on and so on. With so many cyclic references and no garbage collection, all we are left with is garbage itself.

[DavidSharff]

Oh if only the fallout stopped there.

The proliferation of these sources have torpedoed my Google effectiveness.

Not only do these sources amplify themselves, they are of near necessity targeted at simple use cases. The result? Google has ample popular material filled with my relevant keywords but void of any usefulness to anyone not just getting started. As it happens, the people with the most questions _are_ just getting started, and do find the results relevant pushing content on the margins further down the list.

Worse still, with Google's increased focus on natural language processing, their seeming approach of "what you're really asking is..." makes loose queries even more difficult. Definitionally the most common questions aren't edge cases, at least not the single one you're interested in.

After all these years, I think I need to retrain myself on how to Google (distinct keywords no longer cut it unless I have a sequence where I can look for an exact match), and recently started falling back to other search engines with some success.

Edit: grammar (believe it or not)

[thfuran]

>unless I have a sequence where I can look for an exact match

Google these days treats quoted strings as guidelines anyways.

[bsedlm]

I think it's even worse:

Google these days treats your whole query as a suggestion

but quite frankly I am a bit of a glass-half-empty person

[thfuran]

Yeah, but the quotes were meant to mean specifically, exactly this string and even that doesn't work anymore.

[NylaTheWolf]

I've been experiencing that for years and it boggles my mind...

[rockbruno]

I think you hit the nail in the head here, and I'd also say that this is true for pretty much anything that is bloggable today (e.g financial advice, recipes, product reviews) and is a consequence of mass social media making people addicted to getting attention.

[sshine]

I’ve had a personal homepage for almost 20 years, and I’ve never looked at the traffic logs. I am certain I could learn what people care to read about, where people link from, and so on, but a big part of me likes that it’s my page and not my visitors’. It’s just a museum of quirky personality, this is not a potential revenue stream, and I’m not a “content creator”.

[Yhippa]

Affiliate links have ruined all product reviews.

[intothemild]

This has been a growing problem in JavaScript land for many years. I feel it got a lot worse when Vue launched and it's creator got "JavaScript Famous" and was able to earn a salary via supporters and work on the thing full time. It created a gold rush of people trying to all become "JavaScript Famous" so they too could open a Patreon and quit their day jobs.

[Veuxdo]

There was a time when it felt like nobody could learn React without blogging about it.

[jt2190]

Or, the content that is popular right now (i.e. highly ranked in search results and heavily linked to) is dominated by material aimed at novices, because the readership is dominated by novices.

The issue is that the ranking stops working well for the minority of people who are in the advanced category.