Twice now, I've spent considerable time carefully writing an article, just to watch it get 20-30 hits in the first hour, and then disappear into oblivion - never to be seen by anyone again.

If my content was bad, I could understand it - but I've been told (by Dev staff and other developers) that it's really helpful. I don't like to be the judge of my own work, but I don't think my content is bad.

It's great to see the site become a success - but the sheer volume of traffic in here apparently makes it impossible to get a voice.

Putting work into an article feels like a complete waste of time.

I'm not famous or well known (and don't wish to be) so I don't have a million Twitter followers or some other way to get people to notice my content.

I'm guessing that's the only way your content gets noticed here?

It's on the front page for an hour, tops, and then it's gone.

It looks like a quick paragraph or 5-10 words like "do you like X?" or "how do you feel about Y?" gets the same amount of air time on Dev as anything else - and maybe the site equally weighs discussions and actual content?

Mixing discussions and articles into a single stream might not be working well?

I don't know how to fix this, but I've brought it up with the Dev staff before, and they seemed to agree, this is not really working well.

This makes me wonder as well, how much good content from other contributors am I missing? How much actual content gets drowned out by quick prompts and baits?

Honestly, I probably won't bother writing anything else here again until or unless you manage to do something smart about this.

There has got to be some way you can give air time to actual content?

Very frustrating.

I feel like Dev has far more potential than what it's delivering right now.

</rant>