I have been to over 20 calls.
Many people asked me: What platform should I post on?
I think that’s a valid question but the wrong question to ask.
The real question is: What platform should I launch on?
Your blog 📄
If you are in tech and want to grow your product, you need a blog that can be good for:
Motivated developers who wish to learn more about you.
Developers who are doing research about a problem and want to find a solution (SEO).
I don’t like to discuss other benefits, such as credibility and education, that can be for another post.
Now that we have established the importance of a blog, why would you want to use an external blog for your content?
Your external blog 📜
What if:
- People are not aware that they have a problem. (Product without market dominator, such as Novu).
- SEO has a meager amount of traffic, and the competition is stiff.
- You don’t have enough time to wait for long-term channels.
You can use external blogs. They have a lot of mixed visitors who scour their platform daily and might be interested in what you offer.
Those platforms work in the “marketplace” mode, where they promote interesting and trending articles.
Nothing stops you from posting your article on your website blog and then posting your articles to all the other platforms with a canonical link back to your website. I used a freelancer on Upwork for a few dollars to post my articles on DEV, Hashnode, Hacknoon, and Medium whenever I have a new article.
And for the question, “What platform should I post on?” The answer is: all of them.
Traffic to launch 🚀
As I mentioned, the biggest question is, “What platform should I launch on?”
When you launch something, you send every possible traffic you currently have: Social Media, Newsletter, etc. to the platform of your choice. Your main goal is that the platform will reward you with the traffic you send. Here are my thoughts about the different platforms:
Medium
Medium is a generalized platform, and it has the most significant amount of audience for developers. If you managed to trend on Medium, you might get tens of thousands of developers reading your content. But it’s hard.
If you are starting, here is what I would do:
I would not put my launch on Medium. I will post my articles there regularly, and after a while, some publications will contact you and give you the ability to publish the post on their feed. Use it, and always post on their feed. I play with my publications between Javascript in plain English, Bits and Pieces, and Dev Genius. After a while, your audience on Medium will grow, you will get more followers exposed to your new articles, and your initial traffic can significantly increase.
Here is a trick I really liked from Ariel Weinberger, founder of Pezzo.
Ariel has the most extensive Udemy course about NestJS. When he has a NestJS-related article, he sends people to the article on Medium and gets thousands of likes. And you can do the same with different traffic sources you have.
Once you have a vast audience, you can feel comfortable to launch on Medium.
DEV
DEV is my favorite platform to launch; getting your article trending there requires meager traffic. Their algorithm is still young, so you can quickly bring enough traffic and likes to the platform to be on the top feed.
I had articles there reaching 100k views with a minimal amount of marketing.
The platform consists mainly of juniors and Javascript developers. You acquire an audience fast there; I have more than 11k followers in one year.
I feel like the platform has started getting less traffic than in the past.
It’s good enough for now, but let’s see what happens next year.
I am a big advocate for DEV, and my blog contains many tricks to get your articles trending there.
Hashnode
Hashnode is an interesting platform. It’s a blog that consists of many blogs. And on the main, there is a “Featured” section for trending articles.
I think DEV made a better approach since when I go to somebody's article on DEV, I stay on the DEV website so that I might be exposed to other people's articles. On Hashnode, you remain in the personal blog, so the traffic is not circulating. As a result, I feel that Hashnode has much less traffic than DEV.
I was featured on Hashnode multiple times and got little traffic.
What I do feel is that
They get new features rapidly outside compared to DEV
The owner of the platforms is very active daily there and helps articles out.
I think there will be a significant change there in the coming years.
Hackernoon
Hackernoon it’s the weirdest platform of all of them in terms of design. You can post articles. You have to “Submit” them. They also charge companies to post. I had one piece there, and the results were “meh” compared to posting on DEV. The platform itself is super complicated, and the UX is awful. I don’t even post there regularly.
I might lack information about this platform as I am not motivated to explore it deeply. Do you think you know better what to do with it? Let me know.
GitHub 20k ⭐️
I have set on a mission to help people grow through open source by giving weekly knowledge.
This newsletter is good for you if:
- You are considering open-sourcing your product (or building a new one).
- You are considering opening a by-product and open-source it (to reflect on your main product).
- You are in tech and want the growth without the stars / without GitHub trending.
It’s a 100% free newsletter (and always will be). Feel free to register at:
Where do you usually post?
Oldest comments (67)
Good article, one thing I love about DEV is the simplicity of its UI. 😃 Raw markdowns and all that. Hackernoon is indeed the most confusing interface of all!
Hackernoon is a mystery
😂
Great article! DEV is the simplest platform to use and engagement here is pretty amazing.
It's really simple and easy!
Medium shouldn't be part of the competition. Everyone and their grand-mothers know that if an article is posted on Medium, then it's bad
Since Medium is a platform like DEV where different people post their content on.
I tend to disagree :)
Nice overview, thank you Nevo!
DEV is definitely the best one in terms of traffic
Thank you so much Igor!
I haven't used the hackernoon.
Post every where. Coz all the platforms support markdown 😅
Yes, I wrote in the article.
Post in all of them, but launch on one.
DEV is amazing!
DEV is the best one to post Technology articles ❤️💪
Who else is here because of the Banner?? 🤯
Haha, good hook 😛
personal blogs are better than them all honesty
dev.to is full of repeated and unfiltered content, mostly for beginners, very rare to find anything good
It didn't use to be like that. Sigh 😔
But don't you think it's so because it grants access to people to flex their skills? You see it as repeated and unfiltered, but to the person just signing up on Dev or starting out technical writing, this is their break point.
The point I'm trying to make is that Dev, IMO, is very inclusive. Inclusive in that it gives you the opportunity to start as you are (as a beginner writer with the same content someone wrote two weeks ago), and keep growing and getting better at writing and at technical concepts at large.
Now, unless you're writing in your own personal blog or for a blog with dedicated topics, these things are expected. What you learnt 5 years ago (and wrote about) is what someone is just learning and are super excited to write about as well... And the circle just keeps growing and growing like that.
I've tried Hashnode and have all my articles there, but I like the community here at Dec better. I like the reception of my articles a lot better as well.
yep it's too inclusive
If you want to read some great tech article, too inclusive is bad
If you want to write something too inclusive is good only if you are beginner
Since I more read than write, and I am not a beginner, dev.to just doesn't work for me
Yup. Agree.
There is this:
but it seems to do very little to stem the torrent of low quality posts in my feed. I wonder if a human is actually responsible for setting this level on posts (maybe after a cursory review?) - again, maybe @michaeltharrington or @ben could offer some insight here. I really miss the DEV.to of a couple of years back
@jon Randy, From what I know, the moderators are also responsible for tagging the experience level of a post/article.
Perhaps there should be a guideline to use as to decipher what should be high(er) level or not.
But that's just the thing, what will you describe as high level? Because high level is a pretty relative thing. What might seem like a beginner post to you, could be a high(er) level post to someone else.
I think why you think quality has "watered down" is because there are currently more writers than there were before. More and more people are getting interested in documenting their tech learning/career/journey, and thereby making it look like there's a duplication of ideas/posts.
So,what to do about that?
@denis, so what do you suggest is the solution? Filter/review articles before they're published? That wouldn't give beginner writers/learners much of an opportunity to express themselves. Where's the community support in that?
honestly don't know, this is quite a big problem. Maybe downvotes on posts would help, article writers would rather not post something too easy fearing being downvoted
I like this idea.
The only problem is, what exactly does "too easy" mean?
Experience level varies per person. What you term as "too easy" might be the solution to a bug a newbie has been battling with for weeks. You see how these things aren't as black and white?
yep they aren't black and white, but that depends on what kind of a website dev.to wants to be. For example, there's a Russian website habr.com with technical articles, if you want to write something on it the entry barrier is quite high, which makes articles more unique and of high quality (generally). So if dev.to wants to feature unique and good written articles they may make some tough rating system, but beginners would not be able to write anything because of it. If dev.to wants to be an inclusive website for beginners, then it would not attract much people apart from beginners, and it always will be that inclusive swamp of people solving same problems and writing about same stuff. Personally, I don't think small bugs are worth to write articles about, but I agree that beginners should probably somehow be encouraged to write if they have something interesting to write about, and this is not trivial to implement.
Yeah, it's tricky... I guess they could try and funnel different 'levels' of content to their different 'properties' - I believe CodeNewbie is also run by the same team. The trouble with that though is that it kind of splits it into 'us' and 'them', and the name "CodeNewbie" may not appeal to many people writing here as they may feel like more than a total beginner.
@thedenisnikulin @jonrandy, I think the solution is to implement a stricter ranking system such that if you identify with a specific ranking, only posts in that rank will come up.
This will require more people to sign up for the Dev Community moderator role and be serious about the way they rank.
Again, if I'm a React developer and I'm trying to rank an article about 'setting up docker with go', I don't think I will be able to properly rank the article seeing as I do not know what qualifies as high(er) level or not.
All in all, it's not an easy thing to implement, but measures can be put in place to make something work for everybody.
Real gems are rare, but now and then you do come across them ... which always gives me joy when it happens :)
Remember those days when you had your stream of carefully curated blogs RSS feeds in your (preferably Open Source) reader...
Same time you could still listen to good real rap 😢
Some comments may only be visible to logged-in visitors. Sign in to view all comments.