Misc scribbles

The devinterrupted'ening of /r/programming

2022-12-27

Complaining about spammers is kind of a futile endeavor, and in this case, it even seems that there are people behind it which kinda makes me feel bad to complain about it, but I keep seeing this spam-type substance on my sacred forums.

Many of these posts come from a blog called devinterrupted. They post things related to "engineering management" type topics. And, they often "hit a chord" and get highly upvoted and replied to. It's often the type of thing everyone can add their two cents on, or offload some steam. One person called it engagement spam and that seems about right.

This wouldn't all be so bad, but it is sometimes posted with formulaic titles, created by sock puppet accounts and promoting a specific company (linearB). I gathered as many posts from them as I can, helpfully grouped into clickbait-y categories.

Update 2023-01-06: a Reddit user reached out to me who is quite knowledgeable about astroturfing campaigns and confirmed my suspicions here that it's all sock puppet accounts

#Hot takes and pulling no punches

#TIL's

#Cool convos

#Studies and interesting cases

#Conclusion

The devinterrupted blog/podcast appears to be related to the linearB company, who advocate a notion of "cycle time" (https://linearb.io/blog/cycle-time/) as a developer metric engineering managers should look at. They interview some interesting people but someone referred to it as "engagement spam". They promote the "gitStream" product on all the posts on devinterrupted. https://linearb.io/dev/gitstream/

Update 2023: I would bet the "contextkeeper" blog is related because some sockpuppet accounts are posting from both blogs

I'd recommend linearB stop posting these things, or pretending that they are not behind these posts.