When you come to the programming sphere, the first thing you are interested in is: "getting started with Unity", "how to take your first steps in C++", then you come back, wanting to help the rest of the IT community with what you have learned as a developer ("Creating a NEAT algorithm for Unity", "What is UART and how does it work". All these topics have one thing in common: they do not relate to the topic of the mastodon StackOverflow, as this is an opinion, information that quickly becomes outdated and is too vague. In order not to keep in your head a bunch of personal blogs-sites that you trust, you transfer this process of memory and search to a source that, at the expense of you and others like you, helps good authors and dumps bad ones, this is how Hacker News works. And it also removes the requirement to deal with the CMS and pay for hosting, and firstly, not everyone is ready to pay, and secondly, if a person does not pay for hosting, then we simply lose useful information from this site.
*Let's start with Medium. *
It appeared in 2012 and is in the top 100 most popular sites. Initially a good resource from which many other resources began their growth, for example, Towards Data Science, FreeCodeCamp, etc. In fact, Medium is not a platform for IT, but a community, where there are also programming groups. I don't know, there was information about problems in relations with FreeCodeCamp and Hackernoon before. Probably, for me the main disadvantage is the lack of dislikes. Promotion is solved through communities, like the same tds, and paid articles are usually not accepted in the community, which helps to avoid these unpleasant things. It is difficult to say exactly how many programmers there are on Medium, since there are no such statistics, but I think based on the number of subscribers in the communities, there are definitely about 5-8 million. And the problem is the claps: You see 37 claps, this is the only place where you don’t understand whether 37 people liked it or one fake person pressed the button 37 times?
Habr
I am a native of the CIS and this involved me in one of the first communities in this regard - Habr (appeared in 2006, and in general it is more of an ecosystem with Q&A, a separate site for freelancing, which is interconnected from promoted to the top). "Write an article on Habr" has become a stable expression among programmers. However, one of its decisions made it rapidly developing and deprived it of the opportunity to become popular in America and Europe: it unites 90% of all IT specialists of post-Soviet countries, but the main language is Russian because of this. They recently launched Habr on English, but I even asked them why they refused to make an automatic translation like GeeksForGeeks, the answer was: "Before implementing the English version, we considered such a solution and considered it inappropriate." In general, for me, its principles are some of the most scalable and friendly to new authors: your first article is checked by a moderator who really wants to skip your article (yes, yes, I saw this myself, I can give you some examples in the comments), but stories like the five best functions will not be skipped, however, even this check only works for the first article, then the community decides and if you lied, your article is advertising, etc., then it will simply go into the minus, and if there are a lot of them, you will again go to Read-Only. By the way, the problem of trolls and bot farms is solved by the fact that in order to vote (not comment) you need to write an article again. This is probably the largest community right now with 11-13 million users, but it is known so much in the CIS as it is unknown in the rest of the world, which is very sad, because for me it is the ability to vote down (by the way, it is very rare when an article is not accepted) and the invite technique, which does not clutter the main feed, which makes it incredibly easy to promote new authors, and also that almost any article will start a discussion of the information from this article.
Dev community and hackernoon
Good resources with friendly communities. With about 7 and 3.5 million people, they store a lot of interesting articles. They post articles on their site. In my opinion, Google creates all sorts of problems for them, since they are rarely indexed for me, so I have to search on the sites themselves, but reactions give a good understanding of the article, I would like to have the ability to vote down.
Hacker News
The second of the known resources on this topic by the time of appearance (2007). The only site on this list, where the creators clearly considered "The house is a fine house when good folks are within", the content itself is simply wonderful thanks to its long existence, but this is the place where you leave a link to your site, a page in Medium, etc. For me, the experience of working with it rested on UX, because well ... it really looks like a site from the late 1990s, again there is no downvote. However, even my articles received mostly views on Dev.to and Medium were most likely read thanks to HN, as well as r/programming (more on that later). There is no classification by tags, which very greatly limits.
Or rather, some subreddits: r/programming, r/MachieneLearning, etc. They are somewhat reminiscent of Medium, but with a larger reach due to a banal larger number of people, for me reddit has become a very pleasant resource in terms of sharing experience, knowledge. I just don’t understand why, for example, r/MachieneLearning has only 2.9 million people, in theory there are incomparably more specialists and beginners in ML. However, you can’t type “What is smart pointer in C++ reddit?” in the search bar and expect a normal answer, this is again a place where you have a personal blog and you throw articles from it or, for example, from arXiv. There is an opportunity to put a minus to a bad author. My personal experience was not very good: posting any link in reddit, the chance of getting shadowban, suspended on an account flies up sharply, and there is nowhere without links, so I have been writing in appeals for 1.5 months :(.
YouTube
I think that many people forget about it, although in fact it is the largest place where information on various topics in programming is easily accessible. It is the chance to find information there that is the greatest. However, in terms of channel promotion, it is Medium without communities. Although YouTube has the largest amount of information, it is also frustrating that the author of the channel has the ability to delete comments, which makes the desire to point out errors sometimes meaningless, depriving others of reasonable criticism if the author wants it. And you can’t answer the involuntary question: did the author explain everything so well or did he delete the wishes?
Personal experience of writing articles:
Medium, Habr, Dev.to
On medium I get three views, on dev.to I got 27, on Habr 6.7k by sending an article, even when most of the Habr audience is sleeping, comments with questions and improvements.
Oh, you've almost reached the end! For me, among all the examples, Habr remained the most comfortable. BUT this is just my opinion, perhaps, although I tried, I missed something, overlooked something, or you disagree. If so, then write in the comments, no one will delete them:)
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