About: Tech enthusiast with the passion to develop applications that can make this world better. "Whenever I get bored, I call API's"
The dev.to community is growing everyday. I've been using this platform for almost one and a half year, and I guess only one feature is missing that is, the total views count shown on profile. Since Dev is an open source project present on Github it is possible to suggest a feature.
Like in Quora , Total Answer Views reflects on the user's profile and everyone can see.
What do you think about this feature dev family?
Having used Quora for a decade, I can firmly agree that showcasing stats for users is a terrible way to engage users, whether that be followers, views, votes or whatever.
What ends up happening is that the community quickly splits into those who get "traction" early on, for example by:
And you get a cast system where the people who are most popular end up being the people who get the most views. It's a positive feedback loop at the expense of new users.
Newbie arrives, sees no views on their content while locally-famous users get gazillions of comments and support; Newbie gets disheartened because they believe that the stats are a measure of their self-worth; Newbie leaves.
Well this is why I love dev.to. Feel free to share your knowledge irrespective of total views, stats etc.
IMO, dev.to is the best because it doesn't show things like this, which are related solely to a user profile. So even people new to the community have an equal amount of opportunity as a person who has been there for quite a long time/has a lot of followers. Having things like this will move attention towards how successful the "profile" is, rather than the actual content. I understand that content will be good from good/active profiles, but it doesn't mean new or dormant profiles can't have it. Also, I think the community should be focused around content and not "profiles," which is what makes dev.to different from other platforms — just my 2 cents.