Yup, dev.to is full of trash posts by whatever the diminutive of thought leader is, all tagged for beginner. A lot of these are either long, long lists of things you have to learn to be a software developer, or confused explanations of basic concepts. Or yet another bloody linked list tutorial.

I dearly wish that someone would curate the beginners tag.

I would find it very funny if only experts are allowed to write in the beginners tag.

Could you just add a special tag or mark? Something that shows that the article has been approved by the secret council of experts?

Maybe instead of moderating the beginners' tag, we could help authors get better by pointing what's wrong in their articles in the comment section, discuss about what could be enhanced and participate in healthy debates.

Without forgetting to point what is great and what you like in what they are presenting in their articles!

In my opinion, writing an article is also a good way of learning things. Even if it is from people commenting your article.

DEVTOgether!

Very poignant. I'd be particularly interested in having an element of peer review, even if only an option (e.g., this post was peer reviewed, this post was not, etc.). It might sound excessive, but at this stage of content creation, it can certainly play a role.

You raise a great point. What drew me to the the dev.to community was how active members have been in correcting bad info as they come across it. Of course, this doesn't 100% cure the problem, but worth noting.

Moderation is one way to address it, but the ratio of posts to moderators would have to be in a sweet spot

The "Dunning–Kruger effect" is not necessarily restricted to non-experts; there's a lot of examples of experts affected by it, when talking about things of other field or with outdated knowledge, even their quality of expert should be questioned.

I think that "do so with a critical eye" is for everyone and even in curated books, experts also make mistakes, so we should never accept without question.

And is sad but you can't replace common sense, many "methodologies" and tools try, but if someone reads "10 techs you should know..." and doesn't apply some common sense like who's telling this?, in what country?, in what industry?, for what?, etc. There is no amount of moderation enough, specially in an open site like this, with many opinions and subjective topics (dev.to is not a technical documentation after all), and that's one of it's charms, but must be understood and seen at it is; if you come here to collect working code or base your whole understanding and research to dev.to, there is the problem.

So in the end you check "10 techs you should know..." and you tell to yourself, I didn't know Nº3, sounds interesting, I'll give it a little research. That's the value of it.

In old days, people just believe, if the TV, a book or the press told it, must be truth; it was expensive to talk to the public so the information was more curated; nowadays, we don't have that luxury, we have to be more critic than generations before, many will read this thing I'm writing and I'm no expert, probably this has no value and I'm talking nonsense right now, I have been accused of talking nonsense before, and maybe someone will take what I say too seriously; I have no control over it.

Moderation is a hard thing because when something IS moderated, as a reader, you get relaxed, you drop your "critic mode" and as many dev.to topics are opinionated I don't think moderation would be effective.

That said, maybe an additional tag "approved" of "checked" or something on those lines could be useful with expert users endorsing the content, so not so much as moderating but a tool for users to better assess the trustworthiness of a post. And maybe a note to the reader, "this all may be nonsense consume with caution", sometimes a knife in the driving wheel is better to prevent accidents than an airbag (see? nonsense) (is it tho?...)

I hear what you are saying, but I also think there is a lot of value in putting yourself out there and learning in public. IMHO that is what dev.to is all about.

Yes, there are accuracy problems on dev.to...and other platforms including podcasts, youtube, wikipedia, and (like you mentioned) books.

Unlike these other platforms, however, dev.to is first and foremost a vibrant and helpful community. Helpful devs leave constructive comments, and diligent authors amend their posts with the things that they learn.

If you want the highest degree of accuracy, then rtfm. If you want to participate in a dev community then dev.to.

I guess "forbeginners" and "beginners" tags should be differentiated.
Also, as from the viewpoint of finding any help on such an issue I'd have one suggestion for a feature. I think about a basic radio list that takes the information from the author of a post about a subjective level of proficiency in a given topic would help in moderation I believe. I'm curious how accurately such a system would work. 👀

This is the main reason I stopped following AI suggested Medium or Dev.to links. Unfortunately such articles have extremely confident titles that drive huge click-bait traffic and get plenty of comments that try to correct the contents. This make them climb top of the suggestion engine's rankings.

What's worse on Medium is I saw development related publications with huge following welcome those false articles just for the traffic they generate to their publication. So even curated content makes use of them for really bad consequences hard to recover all around the world.

Even worser on Medium is I came across a good amount of paid content on top ranks that you cannot write a comment for correction without paying. I've seen people's comments that bought a Medium subscription just to be able to warn other users. Medium's comments are already burried behind a terrible UI and being behind a pay wall on top of it is really dangerous.

Even worsererer is the authors with false confidence get paid with such content, which rewards an already dangerous act.

Thanks for pointing out such an important problem.

nice thought but no body perfect, no platform perfect

Your point is - posts tagged with beginner are actually by beginners, rather than for beginners?
What is wrong with that? You are assuming other beginners don't realise this? I thought the dunning-kruger effect was that people think they are better than are in practice?
Personally, I read articles on here to get different ideas - beginners or super genius.
Perhaps a new tag - 4beginners?