Is it just me, or has anyone noticed that articles on dev.to don't get as many reads/views as they used to before?
Especially with the new metrics dashboard, it's even harder to actually differentiate sources.
I know that since the rise of AI, more and more people have replaced actually reading with AI snippets or AI summaris. This means a generally reduced audience in technical articles.
I won't even deny not being one of such people myself. I don't read half as much as I used to... And thanks to Google's SERP AI, I have whatever answer I need in seconds.
But the decline in reach on dev.to, even for ranking on SERPs, is rather surprising. Almost as though it isn't being recognized as an authority in the technical article world.
This is probably just me. But I'd like to know if anyone else has noticed this.
Top comments (16)
I believe there’s still an audience for technical articles, but I think that audience is becoming more demanding: AI makes it possible to tackle highly technical topics with surgical precision in the explanations. In my opinion, to be read, you have to go a step further and offer what AI doesn’t provide: human experience and a personal perspective.
Well said!!! Was about to say something similar!
@miracool already asked about this in his article: do people still genuinely care about technical articles - I replied in Who Are We Still Writing Technical Articles For?. The question is relevant, but the answer isn't necessarily the one you'd expect…
Apologies in advance for the negative tone of the following comments and no criticism of this post is intended.
1, Yes, and I blame AI being to primary topic of most of them. Especially when there are many developers that have little interest in AI as a subject and are more interested in understanding and learning things for themselves.
2, Yes, and I blame AI. Why would some developers read articles when they can just prompt their way through their working lives, for however long (or short) that might be.
In my opinion, as a person who still loves reading technical articles, the audiences' standards have become higher than before. In this AI era, people can get any technical information whenever they want and wherever they are so they don't need to read articles just to get information they need. Honestly, I also don't read 'normal' technical articles as much as I used to. But still, it's really enjoyable and interesting to read those articles when they're combined with the authors' personal experience and realization.
There's still very much an audience, but it's worth noting that most people dont actually deep-dive themselves anymore... Instead, they use bots to scrape and write for them summaries. Take yesterday for example, I magically got 200 new followers, but practically no post views? Which means atleast 150 of those were bots that just monitor and extract data.
Interesting, I actually feel the opposite. One of the reasons I came to
dev.towas to look for some authenticity among the generated content that is flooding the Internet today. I wanted to read the voice and opinions of fellow IT colleagues, to read about their struggles, their genuine experiences, and reflections.To be fair, I am quite new to the DEV community (joined 3 months ago), so I do not know how it used to be. Also, I didn't come here to learn, rather to read opinions and hear about some novelties in the tech world. Anyway, whenever I'm picking up some new tool, I search
dev.toto read opinions.Maybe I didn't really answer whether the audience has dropped. I rather wanted to point out that the audience is still there, and I don't think that's going to change 🙂
Same instinct here. I started spending more time on dev.to specifically because other platforms got flooded with generic AI content. The authentic voices and real experience shares are what keep me coming back.\n\nThough I do notice more listicle-style posts lately that feel a bit surface-level. The deep, opinionated technical pieces still perform well when they show up — that's what signals the audience is still here, just more selective about what they engage with.
I was a bit confused by "technical articles", so whether you meant that audience for articles on dev.to in general had dropped, or only the audience for a certain category of articles on dev.to, namely "technical" articles?
(whatever "technical" may be - highly dependent on definition)
My impression (totally not based on stats or numbers, lol) is that content on dev.to is as "alive" and being engaged with as ever - the only thing that's very noticeable is that a LOT of said content nowadays focuses on "all things AI", probably at the cost of the more traditional subjects (tools, languages, frameworks and so on) ...
Also very noticeable that we hardly see these "listicles" anymore, which were all the rage a year ago - you know, articles like:
"The Top 25 React State Management Frameworks EVERY Developer Should Know!"
... seems to be virtually a thing of the past ...
Fads and trends come and go - but dev.to is forever!
Yes! There's no point in writing how-to tutorials anymore, unless you're documenting your own journey or keeping some sort of notes or TIL posts.
For step-by-step guidance on coding tasks, there's a magical text-area that spits out answers like crazy.
Is there still market for tech content? Yes. But we have to give what AI can't. Thoughts, rants, stories...Authenticity.
Technical articles will always be necessary. Right now, AI allows people to quickly summarize dense technical articles which may have previously taken hours to read and understand. However, technical writers and bloggers who code can benefit from being relatable and authentic in their writing.
To me, the best technical articles are written like great recipe blog articles. They start with the writer introducing the recipe (the technology) using some relevant background story or anedote. Then the writer shares the ingredient list (installation instructions, use cases), the full recipe (a detailed Getting Started page), and provides modifications (themes, a showcase of projects by product users). Then the writer wraps up their article with a plug to similar recipes (other technology), links to other pages in their blog, plugging their book, etc.
Good technical articles often keep this same format. AI will always give you the ingredient list and the full recipe without any of the context or interesting tidbits that make all content relatable and digestible.
Yes I did notice it.
Dev.to also deleted my Minkowski distance article, my weak head normal form article, shadowdeletes everyone's comments, bans users (hehe I read an article where there were a lot of replies with 'Thank you, that was an insightful feeback' but the original helpful comment is deleted by dev.to), pushes product placement, does not ban affiliate link posting without disclaimer etc.
All in all dev.to is basically for corpos to shill nonsense mostly.
TL;DR Dev.to really hates this profession, it likes only money 🤣
dev.to is slightly shadowbanned from some other platforms, due to its pretty obvious quality gate issues. 😂
"@dumebii: Perhaps AI content inflation dilutes dev.to's SEO rankings. Consider NLP-based traffic analysis."