Ask HN: Why are most dev.to links submitted to HN dead? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why are most dev.to links submitted to HN dead?

20 pointspier2536 comments

See this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=dev.to

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.

Thanks for your hard work Dang.

Would vouching for a dev.to link make a difference in this case?

Yes. Vouching exists to restore dead posts which are actually good posts for HN.

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.

That's true sometimes but not all the time.

Please don't get stables of people to do anything on HN.

Thanks for confirming Dang!

Is there a public list of banned domains?

No.

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.

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.

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.

You can post the same article both to dev.to and your blog.

This is what I have been doing! I might think twice now.

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.

Just scrolling through the first page of links there it looks like a whole lot of clickbait garbage or overtly scammy looking shit.

I’d say just it’s “meh” rather than spam. Just tutorial sort of stuff but not HN worthy

99% spam

Would you say the same about medium.com too? Or any site that allow people to sign up and create blogs/articles?

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?

> Do they even offer free reads at Medium anymore?

Sometimes. If you disable cookies for medium.com it annoys you much less.

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.

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.

> - 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

Wow...that "tutorial"...

It's not even formatted correctly. It will throw a syntax error before it even runs because of the wrong indentation.

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.

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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=medium.com

Medium.com is only about half spam by the same metric.

Despite both having open sign-ups, they have significantly different average quality.

Sure but medium owns your content. Dev.to retains your ownership of your content.

But I guess for the purposes of spam discussion, that is irrelevant.

I just ignore those since dev.to is blocked on the network here at work...

Wtf?

They're... Not? I looked through the 20 most recent links and 19 worked fine. One 404d but it was an article submitted 3 months ago.

Maybe dev.to was flubbing when you looked?

OP is talking about this https://imgur.com/c9P4n80

Exactly, thanks.

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.

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.

In your user account you can set 'showdead' to 'yes'. It's 'no' by default.

Argh, when the rest of the Internet uses 'dead' in the context of links to mean broken, why would HN use it to mean something else?

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