If you’ve watched even one Fireship video in the past 3 months, you probably know what Daily.dev is. If you don’t, it’s pretty simple. Daily.dev functions as a sort of “hub for crossposting” – a really nice idea, actually. No one is forced to use a certain platform, and writers have the potential to market to a much larger audience.

I have a few complaints about the site though. Most of them are personal though, so I won’t spend that much time on them. Here’s a short list: AI generated summaries, “meh” customization options, and lots of organizations posting slop content that I don’t really care for (this content is also super hard to get out of your feed for some reason). Those are just my opinions though.

However, there is one “complaint” I have that I think everyone should be worried about.

If you haven’t visited app.daily.dev in recent weeks, you might notice something a little bit different on your return. Below the title of each article, there’s occasionally a little yellow shield.

This yellow shield signifies that something on Daily.dev’s end (likely some sort of machine learning model – I’m not completely sure to be frank, as this isn’t my area of expertise) has determined that the title in question is clickbait.

A bad look for Daily.dev

That in itself isn’t a great look for Daily.dev (but wait, we haven’t even gotten to the worst part!). This is absolutely something that could negatively affect an author, and thus, it’s a great way for bias to seep in. What if English is an author’s second language, and because of that, a lot of their titles sound a bit clunky to people who have spoken English their entire life? Their “clickbait” detection system might incorrectly flag that post, thus punishing an author simply because their English isn’t as good as others.

Some possible issues

What if an author has a specific naming or writing style that differs from whatever this detection system prefers? If this detection system is some sort of machine learning model, what if, over time, it “learns” (again, not sure if that’s the correct term or thought process here) to flag listicles more than it does any other kind of article. I’m not the biggest fan of listicles, but there’s nothing against it in Daily.dev’s rules, thus any listicle should have the same chance of success as any other type of post. Again, this is why I think that this is something everyone should be worried about.

And by the way, yes, this has already incorrectly flagged quite a few posts. Here’s an example of one:

And here’s the post itself. I think we can all agree that this clickbait detection system is completely inaccurate.

The worst part

So what’s the worst part? Well, if you pay 💵8.99 USD/month, Daily.dev will automatically change any title flagged as clickbait. So now we have a system that incorrectly flags content, and then automatically changes it without the author’s permission.

This is a wonderful example of extremely unethical behavior as well as developers that have never considered the side effects or potential bias of their software. I mean, c’mon. This is something that I learned in all 4 of the CS classes that I’ve taken – in highschool. I realize that my experience isn’t universal, but considering bias and side effects should really be a fundamental skill as a software developer.

On a quick side tangent: Yes, I’m sure that somewhere along the onboarding process, I probably checked a box that said “Daily.dev, you can do whatever you want with my writing”. This doesn’t make what they’re doing any less unethical though.

What should you do?

This is really up to you. I likely won’t post content to Daily.dev anymore (note the disclaimer at the bottom), as I don’t want to support this behavior. I wouldn’t blame someone for staying on Daily.dev though. As I said at the beginning of this article, they allow you to market to a much wider audience, thus increasing your overall viewership, likes, followers, etc. But if biased software is what allows me to get a few more views, I refuse to be a part of it.

If you have any ideas or opinions to share, please do! I'd love to hear them.

Disclaimer: I will post this (and only this) article on Daily.dev. Maybe one of the administrators will see it and consider the issues with their clickbait detection system.

P.S: If you’d like another place to post your content that specifically doesn’t allow AI generated content, try out my content creation platform for developers, byeAI. Crossposting will be released soon!