Recently, many meta discussions mock and condemn content trends on DEV an everywhere else. I already regret recently writing about online community demise and why DEV is different (at least a little bit, I hope), as the little bit seems to get smaller.
DEV's setting to hide tags, isn't working well anymore, if it ever did. Or it does, but only as a negative following priority. When there is too much spam, slop and fad shitposting, there's not much left to prioritize against.
My recommendations, sidebar, trends, discussions, and, not much of a surprise, the latest recent posts feed is full of crap, although I have already put #codingwithai, #claudecode, #cryptocurrency and #ai and several other hype hashtags on my hiding list.
This is how DEV typically presents itself to me recently when I open the front page: AI and trope titles.
The trends have changed. No more listicles, no more emoji overload, instead, five out of ten posts contain an em dash character, that long hyphen, hard to find on international developer keyboards, popular with American scholars—and with AI chatbots.
Other telltale signs that smell of sloppy writing assistance: "here is what I learned". Intended to signal authenticity, they have become red flags for the opposite, at least in most cases. The current year, 2026 right now, is one of the few evergreen attempts that might be legitimate, but adds negative points to my gut feeling heuristics. Similarly, I couldn't care less about the best dentists in Jaipur or posts in a language that I can't even read.
Maybe DEV and their productive AI community can vibe-code a spam filter that actually works? I will check back in a few weeks and see if things improved. Otherwise, I will have to treat DEV like LinkedIn and medium: a write-only platform to dump some marketing content. I really hope that's not where DEV is going.