Ben HalpernWe now have an attribute on posts which accepts a rating of 1-10 for determining the target audience in terms of how beginner-friendly or advanced a post is.
The goal is to help folks discover helpful content depending on where they fit on that spectrum. The #beginners etc. will still be useful, but this adds one more factor under the hood.
With that in mind, we you may now declare where you feel you stand "experience level" in the misc section of your settings. This is private info meant only to improve your experience on the site.
👉 dev.to/settings/misc
In terms of labeling posts with the appropriate experience level, we're relying on wisdom of the crowds. Users with mod privileges will now be able to rate posts when they append /mod to URLs of posts. There is also now a global dev.to/mod endpoint to be able to do this in bulk. We will add more helpful functionality to this post over time.
All in all this is meant as a gentle indicator to help people see more relevant posts. It's not designed to completely silo content based on its target experience level. The interface for this is also fairly low level. It may make sense in the future to allow people to pick more descriptive words, or possibly rank on 1-5 instead of 1-10.
As an example of where this may come in handy, here is a wonderful post which begins by answering the question "What is Machine Learning?". It's a great read for all, but definitely leans on the beginner end of the spectrum.
Otherwise, this post assumes some more advanced knowledge on the topic and software development in general.
Folks who are more likely to benefit from and enjoy the first post will be slightly more likely to come across it and the folks who will benefit from the second post will be more likely to see the second.
We will have some more instruction available, but mods can get started labeling posts by experience level if they wish to. This functionality will be available for authors of the posts as well in the future, but we'll wait until the interface for the whole feature is a bit more user-friendly.
