Re:Ask HN: Why are most dev.to links submitted to HN dead?
by dang on Monday May 10, 2021 @03:48PM
(#27110093)
That site, along with several similar ones, is banned on HN because it has been the source of too many low-quality posts and too much promotional behavior.
Re:Ask HN: Why are most dev.to links submitted to HN dead?
by ryansolid on Monday May 10, 2021 @10:14PM
(#27113432)
The problem is by then most of the damage is done. HN algorithms clearly work off some amount of time based decay. It basically suggests getting a stable of people to vouch when whenever you post something.
Re:Ask HN: Why are most dev.to links submitted to HN dead?
by WnZ39p0Dgydaz1 on Monday May 10, 2021 @08:04PM
(#27112533)
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.
Re:Ask HN: Why are most dev.to links submitted to HN dead?
by wdencker on Tuesday May 11, 2021 @05:21AM
(#27115952)
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.
Re:Ask HN: Why are most dev.to links submitted to HN dead?
by ryansolid on Monday May 10, 2021 @10:24PM
(#27113508)
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.
Re:Ask HN: Why are most dev.to links submitted to HN dead?
by ev1 on Monday May 10, 2021 @02:22PM
(#27109139)
Honestly? Probably. I flag a huge amount of medium posts too. Currently the top few are pretty obviously spam, though. I do vouch them out of spam also.
The vast majority of the other posts are basically non-interesting or barely-technical stolen content from stackoverflow, spam blogs, amazon affiliate links hidden in a blog post, undisclosed + no "show hn" self promotion.
Re:Ask HN: Why are most dev.to links submitted to HN dead?
by ev1 on Monday May 10, 2021 @04:08PM
(#27110294)
I just realised that it's a 15 year old so I might be a bit harsh, but it's also actual hashtag and keyword spam to pollute search results (#buygme), doesn't work, violates multiple python styles/formats, doesn't have whitespace which is critical for python, ...
The donation button is kind of the icing on the cake for this.
Re:Ask HN: Why are most dev.to links submitted to HN dead?
by iudqnolq on Monday May 10, 2021 @06:12PM
(#27111522)
I'd say that's sort of beside the point. Sure it looks hideous, but it's also brain dead. Comparing against a hard coded password works for some things, but highly sensitive information in a scripting language really isn't one of them. If you wrote that beautifully it'd be just as stupid.
Re:Ask HN: Why are most dev.to links submitted to HN dead?
by PaulHoule on Monday May 10, 2021 @02:17PM
(#27109084)
dev.to covers a domain in which it is possible to be right (passes the unit test, is accepted by the customer) or wrong.
That makes it ring more hollow than Medium does, because much of Medium is rants and musings that could be right, wrong or "not even wrong" and it wouldn't matter.
I don't go to either dev.to or Medium if I can help it. Do they even offer free reads at Medium anymore?
Re:Ask HN: Why are most dev.to links submitted to HN dead?
by boffinism on Wednesday May 12, 2021 @05:57AM
(#27128537)
Oh man, TIL that on HN, when people talk about 'dead links' they mean something specific and different to what the rest of the internet means when they talk about dead links.
Re:Ask HN: Why are most dev.to links submitted to HN dead?
by 1123581321 on Saturday May 22, 2021 @01:03PM
(#27248338)
The original question should have said posts, not links. HN generally doesn’t describe the actual submitted URLs as dead, just the submitted post that contains the link.
Would vouching for a dev.to link make a difference in this case?
Please don't get stables of people to do anything on HN.
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.
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.
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.
Articles that are regurgitated help docs for example. Another example is nearly anything that is tagged #todayilearned.
Too much noise, not enough signal.
above-the-fold of domain=dev.to, page 1:
- https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=euirqe has been posting nothing but stepsize (paid service) and referral links in blog posts for them for two years.
- https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=VECTOR3Studio is a crap, insecure tutorial on how to set a variable in python with a donate to me link as large as the tutorial, with multiple resubmissions
The vast majority of the other posts are basically non-interesting or barely-technical stolen content from stackoverflow, spam blogs, amazon affiliate links hidden in a blog post, undisclosed + no "show hn" self promotion.
Wow...that "tutorial"...
It's not even formatted correctly. It will throw a syntax error before it even runs because of the wrong indentation.
The donation button is kind of the icing on the cake for this.
Medium.com is only about half spam by the same metric.
Despite both having open sign-ups, they have significantly different average quality.
But I guess for the purposes of spam discussion, that is irrelevant.
That makes it ring more hollow than Medium does, because much of Medium is rants and musings that could be right, wrong or "not even wrong" and it wouldn't matter.
I don't go to either dev.to or Medium if I can help it. Do they even offer free reads at Medium anymore?
Sometimes. If you disable cookies for medium.com it annoys you much less.
Maybe dev.to was flubbing when you looked?