If you've spent any amount of time on Dev.to in the past year, you've certainly noticed the uptick of low-quality "listicle" articles (often referring to the low quality click-bait type articles in a "Top 5" style). Or if you haven't noticed it yourself, you've probably seen other users complaining about the uptick - even making the top 7 posts published last week [Dec 11th, 2023].

The Conundrum of the "Top X" Articles 🤔

Rafał Goławski ・ Dec 8 '23

#discuss

🚨 🚀 25 Reasons (You MUST Know!!) Why *Some* “Listicles” Are BAD for dev.to 🤯 👿 🚨

Best Codes ・ Dec 11 '23

#webdev #sad #help #javascript

While this trend may or may not have been exaggerated with the increasing availability of AI tools, this concern about listicles has been a discussion point on Dev.to for a few years. This past weekend while listening to the Cortex Podcast, Host CGP Grey mentioned an economic phenomenon called "The Missing Middle" and how it related to the landscape of YouTube this past year, and it made me think about the listicle situation on Dev.to and how it might be less of a problem and more of a natural economic occurrence for a growing platform.

Disclaimer for Economic students - I know that this isn't exactly how the missing middle is intended to be used, but I couldn't find better phrasing for it and this article was the closest thing I could find. If you know a more appropriate phrasing for what I'm explaining please let me know in the comments 🙏🏻 For readers interested in the specifics of Missing Middle Housing, check the Wikipedia page

So what is "The Missing Middle"?

Originally, this was about the housing market and the loss of options in the middle class range, but applied at a higher level this is the phenomenon where over time, a market goes from having a variety of selection in the low, middle, and high quality range - but over time the middle quality options start to disappear as the supplier trends towards either the low or high quality side of things.

This can be for a variety of reasons - in the housing market partially this was caused by changes in zoning laws/requirements making housing harder to build. For online content on platforms like YouTube or Dev.to it can be because of what the algorithm rewards. CGP Grey calls out that there's been a trend on YouTube where users are favoring either short form content (Shorts) or particularly long form content (4-hour documentary deep diving some obscure interest). I particularly like the 2-axis spectrum that he proposes, one axis for effort and one axis for length, where the points that the algorithm is rewarding most is the extremes of the axis - Short + High Effort, Short + Low Effort, Long + Low Effort, and Long + High Effort.

Note that Effort isn't necessarily the exact right word here, but is a "close enough" word to describe something along the lines of "doing the research and validating that everything is going to be accurate for the reader"

Naturally, the most content is going to be created in the Short + Low Effort extreme since that requires the least amount of time/effort to create - which I think applies fairly directly to the Listicle situation here. But the high-effort content still exists - the Top 7 posts each week often has a few articles that I find interesting and will read through - the question becomes how can interested readers find that content outside of the Top 7 posts each week?

I don't necessarily have any profound new addition to the situation, but thought it was interesting that it aligns so closely to what creators on other platforms are experiencing, as well as the physical space as well.