A couple months back, we launched the DEV Community Satisfaction Survey with an announcement here:

Take the DEV Community Satisfaction Survey!

dev.to staff for The DEV Team ・ Aug 23 '22

#meta #announcements #feedback

The survey officially closed on September 26th with a total of ~800 participants. We're now ready to share some of the results with you all.

Let's dive in!

TL;DR

• 68% of folks feel satisfied with the content they see in their home feed, while 27% are unsatisfied.
• The top 3 types of posts people currently enjoy are:
  • Programming tutorials (81.9%)
  • Discussions (54.1%)
  • Personal stories (41%)
• The top 3 types of subjects folks like to read are:
  • Web development (78.8%)
  • Backend development (68.8%)
  • Frontend development (66.7%)
• 89% of folks feel safe & encouraged to share their thoughts, while 93% of people feel protected by moderators and the Code of Conduct.

Raw Quantitative Data

1. “How satisfied are you with DEV?”

• 810 answers (Avg Rating = 7.7/10)

2. “Are you satisfied with the content you see in your home (relevant) feed?”

• 812 answers (68.1% are satisfied, 27.2% are unsatisfied, 6% other)

3. “Do you feel safe and encouraged to share your thoughts and feelings with the DEV community?”

• 808 answers (89% do feel safe & encouraged, 8.1% do not, and 3.4% other)

4. “Do you feel protected by our team of moderators and our Code of Conduct?”

• 800 answers (92.9% say yes, 5.8% say no)

5. “Are there any specific areas of DEV that you feel we could improve upon?”

• 307 open answer responses

6. “Do you feel satisfied with the number of emails we send you?”

• 801 answers (67.2% say it’s perfect but no more, 21.2% yes but could see more, 9.3% no receive too many, 5.5% other)

7. “Have you ever participated in a DEV hackathon and if so, did you enjoy it?”

• 805 answers (13.5% yes and enjoyed it, 2% yes but didn’t enjoy it, 59% no but with the right topic they would, 20.4% no and no interest, 5.8% no and found promotion to be off-putting, 2.9% other)

8. “What do you know about CodeNewbie Community?”

• 808 answers (52% nothing, 33.5% is aware, 12% a member but not active, 4% an active member and enjoy it)

9. “Check the box beside the activities that you commonly perform on DEV:”

• 797 answers
  • Read posts (91.4%)
  • Leave reactions (64%)
  • Browse articles in home feed (57.6%)
  • Write posts (48.8%)
  • Comment on posts (47.9%)
  • Follow tags (42.2%)
  • Follow users (42%)
  • Search for articles using the DEV search bar (35.6%)
  • Follow organizations (20.8%)
  • Other (1.7%)

10. “What types of posts do you enjoy on DEV?”

• 791 answers
  • Programming tutorials (81.9%)
  • Discussions (54.1%)
  • Personal stories (41%)
  • News (40%)
  • Maker tutorials (35.7%)
  • #help posts (asking for help/helping others) (25.5%)
  • Other (0.9%)

11. “What types of subjects do you like to read/post about on DEV?”

• 793 answers
  • Web development (78.8%)
  • Backend development (68.8%)
  • Frontend development (66.7%)
  • Application development (53.2%)
  • Career development (48.1%)
  • Developer lifestyle (46.8%)
  • Discussions (34.6%)
  • Data Science (25.1%)
  • Other (5.4%)

Noteworthy Long Responses

1. “How satisfied are you with DEV?”

• "I rarely look at my feed, I generally visit dev when I get a digest email.”
• "Some of the feed is good but even with weighting it could be better and lots the same things appear. “
• "The topics I follow aren't very active, so it's not really DEV that is responsible for me not seeing a lot of content.”
• "It's fine. I feel like I got more out of the feed years back when I was a new developer and actively looking to grow my knowledge. These days I don't see a lot of value in spending time on the home feed, and when I do check out articles a lot of time I'll find low quality JS articles with incomplete information.”
• "Sometimes I see repeated content overall content is Good.”
• "Satisfied but need more”
• "There are great posts from time to time but it's so difficult for me to find them because of all the clickbaity or half-assed posts. I feel there are so many very self-centered and confident men there now. When I started on Dev, I feel like there were so many queer folks and women posting - what happened to that?”
• "Yes, I am satisfied with the content you are showing but I want that it shows relevant content not promotion content. As in my home feed I will see both content like simple content & promotion contents.”
• "Mostly satisfied, I just wish I could toggle off posts in languages I don't speak, and low quality posts.”
• "I would love to be able to add negative weight to subject I don't care, even if they mention tags I follows… Without following them of course"

3. “Do you feel safe and encouraged to share your thoughts and feelings with the DEV community?”

• "It often does not make sense. I do not fear the trolls, but I think it is too many people with very little experience.”
• "95% of the time, I do, but there is a small amount of discussion that isn't constructive towards discussion. I try to nip those early but some have required blocking. “
• "I had one "negative" experience in all these years (3 or 4 years?) - an unfriendly interaction with another member which got a bit out of hand, and both of us got a slap on the wrist, even though I was fully convinced that I was in the right - never mind, it can happen.”
• "Just like any other community, DEV has its trolls, seeking self-affirmation, mostly by diminishing the others with fallacies and teasing. Even so, they seem to be less common here, which is somehow an encouragement.”
• "safe, but not encouraged”
• "I don't want my account to be connected to Git or any other public account. I want a degree of anonymity”
• "I don't usually comment but the comments I've read from others seem open-minded and welcoming. “
• "Yes, I feel safe and encouraged by the DEV staff and users with more dev experience. No, I don't feel safe and encouraged by the tech bros who all of a sudden discovered DEV."
• "It depends - I feel it's safe to share thoughts if they're strictly about tech, but if there's, for example, even a little mention of (gender) equality, I'm afraid what the response will be. I've experienced myself, and seen in other posts, how rude some community members get when you talk about (gender) equality. “
• "Feeling 'safe' is not something I think about.”
• "I feel it is safe to share, but I don't feel comfortable. I don't think people want to hear/read from seniors. “

5. “Are there any specific areas of DEV that you feel we could improve upon?”

• "Podcast?”
• "I can't pick out everyone that engages with my content.”
• "The sign-up process - why do I have to have an account on one of several other platforms to create one here? GitHub MAYBE I could understand, since it's developers talking to developers, but still. But Twitter? Really???"
• "The search is crap. Frankly replacing it with a " site:dev.to" Google Search would be an immediate improvement before it can be replaced by something better.”
• "There seems to be a lot more spam or low-quality posts in general. It's a little frustrating and makes DEV less valuable for me.”
• "1. Sorting comments by date 2. Option to share Badges on social platforms"
• "Clearly too many web dev related topics in the newsletter. This IS sad. Why is mostly webdev featured? Other topics deserve that spot as well.”
• "Ease for searching # that you don't follow"
• "dark mode should be openly visualize”
• "give us a way to exclude content/tags.”
• "Relevant feed should take in account my "expert level" and my list of tags with -1000 weight. I want to avoid seeing JavaScript. At all.”
• "Your extreme WOKEism! Make DEV free of politics, please.”
• "I think the number is appropriate but in general the content quality is appropriate for more novice, junior or mid career devs, with very little content for senior and above. Maybe emails tiered to post experience levels?"
• "Getting feeds from Hashnode working so I don't have to manually crosspost”
• "Why Dev doesn't utilize the whole available space on my 24 inch monitor? And on my 34 inch monitor it's even worse! It seems like just a website made for tablet centered on the screen :'(. Because of this, most of the time I've to horizontally scroll code snippets and the editor looks real messy. Please do something to fix this.”
• "Dev.to is a platform for discussion among developers, help posts and even post tutorials. But It would be great if it had a discord channel for any queries and instant feedback."
• "It would be great if I can listen to posts with some text-to-speech tool.. like https://medium.com/ or https://hashnode.com/… e.g. medium.com uses https://integrations.speechify.com/"
• "I think DEV needs a quick tour for new members to learn more about using DEV”
• "Surfacing high-quality content. For most of my time on DEV I was only following tags and becoming increasingly disappointed with the content. Only after reading discussion posts on this issue did I learn good content is only surfaced by finding and following high-quality writers.”
• "Perhaps more tools for orgs to foster their communities within Dev? I see some orgs like Strapi posting, but there could be other aspects that may be worth centralizing in Dev, like governance, questions, discussions “

6. “Do you feel satisfied with the number of emails we send you?”

• "I recently unsubscribed mainly due to the reason stated above: content is great for novice, junior or mid career engineers, but that's not my case so I get little value from the email. Never the less the number is appropriate."
• "I think I have my account configured so I only get an email when I get a notification, which is perfect. I don't like marketing emails."
• "It's not that too many, but the notifications can become problematic. Fortunately, it can be disabled, but more granularity would be appreciated.”
• "Yes of course! But maybe integrate more images to make people want to click on the link and read more.”
• "I don't think we should receive as many mail as we do… Ok I ticked the boxes, because the forem android app, simply provides no notifications no matter how I set it up. But I think you should find a way to allow people to group them on a 6-12h delay. We don't need much sometimes"

7. “Have you ever participated in a DEV hackathon and if so, did you enjoy it?”

• "I don't see the benefit in my case. I have won multiple hackathons in the past.”
• "No, I have not participated in a DEV hackathon due to the age restriction.”

9. “Check the box beside the activities that you commonly perform on DEV:”

• "Bookmark & Reading list”
• "I usually browse by "latest" so I don't get stuck seeing the same articles. I'm aware I might miss something that way, and I do periodically visit the "relevant" feed, but I would prefer to be able to choose which was the default."
• "Report users/posts, too.”
• "Browse Hackathon submissions.”

10. “What types of posts do you enjoy on DEV?”

• "Explanations on theoretical concepts”
• "Systems & at-scale stories/lessons”
• "Kubernetes, docker, container, security topics”
• "research topics”
• "Jokes”
• "just thoughts, not tutorials; maybe I could call them "essays"”
• "Explaining or examples of new features / technologies”
• "Best practices, soft skills”
• "Challenges”
• "Tips and tricks”

11. “What types of subjects do you like to read/post about on DEV?”

• "Infrastructure and Cloud”
• "Terminal emulator development and all around it”
• "DevOps and Cloud “
• "Security”
• "Game development”
• "Would love UI/UX design related posts”
• "Serverless and AWS “
• "RPA, Lowcode no code"
• "Ethics, DEI”
• "Blockchain & Web 3”
• "Web scraping/crawling”
• "DevRel, Accessibility, Kotlin”
• "Mobile development”

So, What's Next?

First off, we greatly value our community members' opinions and are so grateful to those of you who took the time to participate in our survey! 💚

We're still digging into the results to try and figure out where we can make the most positive impact on the community. While we received a fair amount of praise in the answers to our open-ended questions & the general results were quite encouraging, we also received some very valid, constructive criticism.

A lot of the feedback y'all gave tells us that we need to keep working on our methods for getting y'all quality content. One area we will definitely continue to hone is our home (relevant) feed. We hope to get better and better at delivering you all content that fits your preferences and skill level! We're also going to be thinking outside the box feed, for new and interesting ways that we can introduce to help y'all discover relevant content.

At the same time that we improve the reader experience, we also plan to continue honing our author tools. After all, if we expect folks to share great content on DEV, we gotta offer up top notch tooling. On that note, we just recently announced a new feature for scheduling out posts; while this feature was not mentioned in survey responses, it was the most requested feature in our discussion If you could add one feature to DEV, what would it be? Y'all can expect more improvements along these lines as we look to improve the platform for content creators.

Lastly, y'all can definitely expect us to share more of these surveys! We've learned a lot from this experience and look forward to continuing the conversation with you all in future surveys. Again, many thanks to those of you who filled out the survey and shared your honest feedback with us — appreciate y'all! 🙏