I'm a DEV Trusted Member, which means I spend a pretty unreasonable amount of time in the review queue and comment sections here. That gives you op...
For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse
It would be great if you can add those list into the Issues tab on the Forem Repository. @ben would love your suggestions on what features should be added onto DEV.
Great seeing me as an example lol
Sure will do it. And thank you for the read, I genuinely thought why are people not interacting?😅
Also, about the example, I didn't want to add someone as one without asking them out. So, I thought who about someone whom everyone knows.😂
Anyways, Have a Great Day!
lol fair enough. Sometimes it's bad timing and sometimes it's great timing. I get those alot.
A ping would be nice "@francistrdev", so that I can see it as well. (I found this article by simply scrolling lol).
You as well :D
Yeah bad timing, its just that I had day off for college and had this draft since days and was getting bored, so I posted at the most unreasonable time: IST: noon🫠. From next time I'll definitely ping you.😄
Did it, thanks for the idea!😄
No problem! Do note it does take a bit of time since they are busy with other features, but they will look at it for sure! Just to let you know the updates on that.
I would like the "Followers" really mean something here.
I currently have 4645. Or that's what dev.to says. But when I write a new article? If I get 100 views, I am lucky. Reactions? Little to none...
So what are those "people" following? Is dev.to failing to show my content to them? Or am I really so so bad in writing that everyone just see it is an article by me and run away? Should I believe that? After seeing so many AI-slop nonsense that gets engaged (with AI generated comments)?
Ok Sir, let me answer this very precisely. Cause I used to think the same thing.
See I have this much followers but not all posts can get proper amount of views:
The reason: A lot of people on DEV are just for reading content, most are working individuals who open it once in a while. And handful amount of bot accounts.
DEV Team solved this problem by having curation feature. So, even if you see an AI-generated post getting a lot of engagement, there are actually very low chances, it'll get curated.
Also, when someone follows you, they get a notification always. Also, your posts are prioritized in their feeds.
Also, DEV promotes the posts which get early engagement.
This is it, Sir. You can ask me if you have any other doubts.
And Sir @francistrdev, was this all correct?
Based on what I read, this is normal for followers vs views.
Sometimes you have a lot of followers, but get little engagement. Sometimes vise versa. It happens and that's for any social media from the beginning of time.
For example, 1K followers does not mean 1K views for each post. It fluctuates and that's normal.
Correct, but note that Community Curators are human and we decide on who's post gets a Gem.
Hope that helps!
Honestly, no it does not help. Clicking "follow" imply you are interested in reading more from that author. Of course you never get everyone into reading your articles. I also didnt thoroughly read all content from 15 ppl I chose to follow here. But are you really telling me my articles generate notifications to couple of thousand people and I constantly fail to impres 95+% of them? But they are not cancelling the follower status which would be the most logical step to avoid content you are actually not interested to see. They just quietly keep ignoring me... I should belive that?
I'll tell you what I think it is going here - I actually have very little real human followers. Tens, maybe lower hundreds. That naturally result into my poor numbers. And that's fine. I am not actively building my reach and I am no famous person. So it is as it is.
The rest are just mere bots. Bots that someohw are able to discover my account and hook to me via "follow" button in significant numbers, but then just sit there and do nothing.
I call it loud and proud, that accounts like
@ayush_mapari_dea3f3a92232,@emmanuel_ohani_c253de5899,@boyoyfg_15a0f9035c4e9dec8,@sri_balaji_6a3853ae3ba01or@sudais_yy_04c73268f48b7a1are no real people.And you are either not aware of the sheer amount of bot traffic here or you chose not to care because any traffic help you inflate your numbers and look more relevant.
That's ok. It is your page. Your money involved. I am just a guest here. And to be fair - you are great platform for the writing itself. The best I know. Even with little to no engagement here, I can at least effortlesly publish here and link my articles elsewhere. And they will stay here indefinitely (I hope).
But for a feedback what to change to make me love dev.to even more, the thing with followers is the most painful for me.
Sir, it's simple if you got a genuinely good issue that none of us can. Just add it to forem repo. The guys who own the platform would be happy to hear about it.
And yes sir I have an IND-TECH-WEEKLY series and about 4300 followers but get less than 100 views on it.
And we don't inflate anything but you still got some questions ask to the ones that can answer you properly.
@francistrdev, @ben, @peter, @heyitsjem, @jess .
These guys will help with your queries.
Okay, this one has been sitting in my drafts for way too long. 😂
I've spent a frankly unreasonable amount of time on DEV, so eventually I had to make a wishlist.
Some of these features feel like obvious wins.
Some would probably make the platform considerably worse.
And I'm genuinely curious which side of that line you think I've put them on.
What would you add to the list? 👀
Great post! Nice to see that you also turned it into issues on Forem 🎉
What I am constantly missing on DEV is a way to organize my reading list 😧 I have plenty of articles saved for later, and it would be super helpful to filter and categorize them somehow, for example, based on the topic or reading time. Sometimes I only have a small bit of time, perfect for reading a 5-minute article; other times I have a wish to read about a certain topic, and I remember I have a perfect article saved on the list, but need to look for it among all the others.
Or maybe it's just me having a mess in the Reading List and having +100 articles saved there? 😅😅😅
That's a good one. Well TBH people do save posts for later but not 100+😅.
But right now you can filter them by tags, is that not working or you got some other filter in mind?
I rather meant some custom sections/shelves you could create for saved articles, for example: "for my current project", "relatable", etc. Now that I think about it, it could also be helpful to have such an option in Archived. Sometimes I want to go back to some article but cannot remember which one I'm looking for.
Yeah, now that's a proper wishlist addition. You can add this one to Forem repo.
Good idea, actually! Will do now :)
I really like the idea of a one-tap translation feature, especially for DEV’s global community. The point about series discovery also makes a lot of sense—finding the first post in a series shouldn’t depend on already having a direct link. And I agree that keeping downvote counters and follower-style recommendation systems out helps preserve the quality of discussion. Great thought-provoking list!
I was 100% expecting you to bring up the progress bar. Here, the main content is usually way shorter than the comment section, and I often have to scroll down to see the end, then go back to the top.
We don't have progress bar, but we got this:
You can collapse comment threads. But yeah if you think progress bar is a better move, just add it to the Forem repo, they'll be happy to hear it. Have A Great Day!
Oh thankyou! I didn't notice it. But a progress bar would do the job without having to scroll down and collapse the comment threads.
Oh, we can't collapse the comment section as a whole?
Then maybe they should add that too...
Bro, what's the point of collapsing whole comment section?
Also, if you think this is genuinely needed, you can add it to the forem repo as an issue.
If I can collapse the whole comment section by default, I can infer how much of the post I have read by looking at the scrollbar. That's why. I'll open an issue to add the progress bar when I get time 👍
feature 5 hits close to home. I co-authored pieces with people too. One name goes on top. The other gets a mention in the text. That split never matches the real work. Did DEV give any reason why co-author credit stays inside organization accounts only??
No, I haven't asked them explicitly😅. But yeah I've added this as a new feature issue on Forem repo. Let's see!
Love the translate toggle and public edit history ideas; those would seriously level up trust and reach here. I’d add one more: better tooling for collaborative moderation on heated threads, so Trusted Members can de-escalate early instead of just reacting to flags.
I think it'd be better if you add this one from your POV through an issue on Forem repo. And Have A Great Day!
It's been quite a while since I went back to someone's post and they had very obviously completely rewritten it, but it's an interesting feature request!
Well, like someone said in the comments, that they saw someone quietly changing facts. So, yeah something like this would help.
The edit history one reads differently if you come from a docs background. In API documentation, a visible revision history isn't a transparency nicety, it's the thing readers use to figure out whether the snippet they're about to copy is still current. DEV posts have exactly the same decay problem: half the tutorials I land on were accurate for a version of the library that shipped two years ago, and there's no signal at all about whether the author came back and fixed it.
So I'd argue the diff view matters less than a lightweight "substantively updated on X" badge. Full diffs are noisy for typo fixes and most readers won't open them. A single marker that separates "author corrected this" from "author fixed a comma" would do most of the work, and it's the writer who knows which one it was.
On your #3 relief - no view counts, I'd push back gently. Not showing views publicly is good. Not showing them to the author either means you genuinely can't tell whether a post underperformed because the idea was weak or because you published at the wrong hour. That's the difference between learning something and guessing.
That's why I said, not for typo fixes.
And views are visible to authors on dashboard.
Really nice suggestions.
Yes a series page would be good!
Sexy observations 😎
What?😂
This is soo very detailed....I love it!!
Thanks! Have A Great Day!
Dhruv, the Series one 👀 I have a series too, so yeah I would love to have this. And the translation one would be so useful here too! Also saw Dev Opportunity Radar in the banner; thanks for including it 😀
Yeah I actually took a lot of time on images: cover and the ones in the post. So, I went for the most read series(Yours) and most famous profile(@francistrdev). 😂
Yeah, I can tell you put a lot of thought into the images. Not many people put that much detail into the cover and images, so I really loved that. I’ve seen @francistrdev do this too, the GIFs and banners he adds to his posts are always so good! And wow, great to know that Dev Opportunity Radar is actually the most-read series 😄 You just made my day!
Thanks, well it takes a lot of time but I genuinely spent 3-4 hours on this little post😂.
And Its good to hear from someone that you made their day😄.
This makes me genuinely cry ngl. Rarely anyone mentions my name outside of my posts...
I appreciate it ;)
Well, TBH my sad young life is that I rarely find someone who genuinely connects well with AS I BECAME INTROVERT after covid.😅
So, as you said from now I'm gonna mention you everywhere I find necessary.
And just to let you know. I call you Sir Because: whenever I hear "Francis", My mind always goes Sir Francis III.🤣
A feature for reordering of posts of a series.
That's a good one. Till now I've always created series post in order they should be but yeah, can help a lot!
One I'd add to the wish list: tell authors when a post isn't being indexed. Forem decides that per article from its score (skip_indexing? in article.rb) and quietly renders a noindex robots meta tag, but nothing in the dashboard says so. I only found out through view-source, and the page carries three robots meta tags, so checking the first one gives you the wrong answer. Even a small "not in search yet" label would stop people rewriting posts that were never the problem.
I haven't encountered something like that before. Also, when you publish, the post does appear in latest tab on home page. Also, I would not say something like that is not completely possible because sometimes it takes time for the post to appear, it may happen post is there but you can't search it by title in search bar.
Though, great insights. Have a great day!
Nice one!
My vote is for the Series tab. 💯
The easiest one to implement too (I think)!
Not sure about implementation cause if we're going only series then we'll need followers, bookmarks and likes for it too.
But yeah something a lot of people would want to have.
Thanks for the read!
Have a great say😄
The edit history one is the real gap. I've caught two posts this year where the author quietly rewrote a controversial take after the comments made them look bad, and there's zero trace of it — just the "edited" flag that tells you nothing. A simple diff view like GitHub's would solve that in maybe 200 lines of frontend work, and the fact that Forem hasn't shipped it after this long tells me it's a priority problem, not a technical one.
Yeah, exactly — that “priority problem, not a technical one” distinction is the interesting part. If the implementation is relatively straightforward, then the real question is whether the transparency benefit is worth spending product/engineering time on compared with everything else on Forem’s roadmap.
And that’s probably the harder decision than actually building the diff view.
I’d like edit history and series tab. 🥰
We want this features!
Well, added them to issue on Forem repo.😅
That's a good list, bro.
But I do like the fact that followers and voews are hidden. Someone can be very new and still get reach cause the writing was good.
Thanks bro. It's one of the reasons I put that in the later part of the list.😄
And that series thing is good, cause I've seen some profile who have a series on going may be good too but the reach of the posts is not big. so..
Yeah. one of the reasons I added that.😅
i think i would like improvements to the article editing / writing in general
hello
Feature requests need success criteria. Compare discovery and notification changes against creator workload and reader retention before shipping.