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Ben Lovy
Ben Lovy

Posted on

How many of y'all are using DEV Connect?

I think DEV's chat feature is super cool, but I'm coming up on my two-year badge in a few weeks and I've still got enough fingers for each conversation I've had. I get the sense that some people communicate this way more often, but I'm curious to get an overall temperature!

Photo by Mihai Surdu on Unsplash

Top comments (39)

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aminejvm profile image
Amine

WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT ? a DEV chat, I didn't know that

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deciduously profile image
Ben Lovy

There's a whole paper airplane for it:

chat icon

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aminejvm profile image
Amine

Ouch my bad, I didn't notice it.

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deciduously profile image
Ben Lovy • Edited

I'm not, you know, trying to be a jerk or anything. But there's also a button:

amine

You just gotta stalk folks.

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aminejvm profile image
Amine

imma start with you tomorrow for sure :D!

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deciduously profile image
Ben Lovy

Vaguely ominous. I'm in.

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

Our chat, called DEV Connect, has for most of its existence been not quite where we want it to be to really do a promotional push to drive awareness. But we've been patient building it out and we're just getting into the phase where we will be leaning into driving awareness.

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deciduously profile image
Ben Lovy

Edited, thanks!

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justaashir profile image
Aashir Khan

The problem is we can only talk to people, whom I follow, and they should follow me too.

I've 12000 followers, but I'm just following 70.
I want to follow all the 12000, so anyone can talk to me but how should I do it, there is no bulk action 😕

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moopet profile image
Ben Sinclair

You really don't want to follow 12000 people! That wouldn't be something you could manage, and it wouldn't help anyone.

What you want is to allow anyone to talk to you, regardless of whether they follow you or not, and you can set that under Settings -> Misc -> Connect.

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zaynaib profile image
Zaynaib (Ola) Giwa • Edited

I did not know this existed!!

Can we embed gifs in the chat?

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enzo profile image
Enzo

Didn't notice either haha. I think the icon is not the best to explain the purpose.

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atulcodex profile image
🚩 Atul Prajapati 🇮🇳

🙄 seriously

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codemouse92 profile image
Jason C. McDonald

For me, it seems to be "if I have no other way of contacting ".

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aleksandrhovhannisyan profile image
Aleksandr Hovhannisyan

But that, like, requires socializing

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moopet profile image
Ben Sinclair

I use it for saying things to people in general if it's not worth making a post.

I'm in two minds about it. One one hand, cool, it encourages socialisation more than a DM system like Twitter or Quora or such - on those places I feel like they're intrusive ways of talking to people, but a general channel is a great way to make friends.

On the other hand, it's never going to replace any of the 9000+ other chat systems people already use, and (as these comments demonstrate) people aren't going to use it.

If it was linked to IRC, say, or Slack by a bot so you could use the chat on the website or through your regular client, that'd be better.

If there were more signposts or certain things (like, say, mini AMA sessions) were held on chat, that might drive people there.

I'm sure there used to be some kind of "event" or "session" feature here for things like livestreams, which could have their chat linked to a chat channel too.

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jasterix profile image
Jasterix

I used it once to reply to an ad, but not sure how open others would be to a random message. Any way you guys can promote this? On a scale of Twitter to LinkedIn, how camaraderie do you want to generate?

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devanghingu profile image
Devang Hingu • Edited

i seen that but i didn't chat with anyone... over here.. because i doesn't have any topics to do that.
😄
if your find any topics to discuss with me just do it please. atleast i can use that features through it. 😂

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moopet profile image
Ben Sinclair • Edited

Additional additional: Dev Connect hasn't had any activity on it since last November according to my PC... but I remember there was a period where everything I typed appeared for me but nobody else (the perils of javascript!).

So who knows, it might be enbroeked.

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rodiongork profile image
Rodion Gorkovenko

I'm afraid the idea of "chatting with only those whom you mutually follow" is very prohibitive.

Chatting and following is quite orthogonal so it won't occur to me to wait for mutual following if I just want to send to person some private notes about some comment (e.g. name of the company discussed etc).

So unless there is feature like "send request for chat" to user whom you are not following (mutually!) - the thing is still-born.

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moopet profile image
Ben Sinclair

There are general channels, and if your profile is set up that way (Settings -> Misc -> Connect) then you can get messages from anyone.

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leob profile image
leob

I use it occasionally, but I think awareness of it is pretty low.

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ifone456 profile image
Gerzon Z.

So there was a chat here huh

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deciduously profile image
Ben Lovy

this whole time. You have to mutually follow.