It's a sad day. I'm unpublishing all my articles on DEV.to π’
I love DEV. I got in the Top 7 one week with my article Svelte is the most beautiful framework I've ever seen, which had 78,000 views(!) from getting on the front page of Hacker News, thanks to Ben Halpern himself. And I even got a free DEV t-shirt I proudly wear.
Recently, starting in January my reach on here has dropped from thousands of views down to a dozen per article, or less. I don't know what happened. Was it a flood of low quality ChatGPT-written content? Or have people just moved elsewhere? I don't know.
And why am I unpublishing? Since joining DEV, I've always cross-posted my articles on both here and my personal website. Unfortunately, despite adding a canonical URL in my articles, if you search on some article titles on DuckDuckGo (mostly) but also Google, DEV still shows up as a search result oftentimes. So, I decided I'd rather just have my blog show up in those results.
In any case, if you want to find me, I'll still be writing over on my blog at www.codingwithjesse.com. Or you can sign up for my newsletter.
So long, and thanks for all the unicorns!
Top comments (28)
It's ultimately your decision, and the platform allows you to leave with your content.
I can understand your frustration if you made it to the "top" and now get the impression your are ignored.
However, these things (views, likes, comments) are so volatile. Unless you have built some kinda of community, content feed and newsletter around your work, you should not expect anything from DEV if your primary goal is to raise your stats.
There's no good or bad, for example, some people write listicles and generate hundreds of likes and thousands of views, but these articles are actually great. Other articles seem to require huge efforts and time from the author but do not get too much attention.
There's also a drop in people's attention in general, especially for blog posts, according to various studies.
@grahamthedev wrote something interesting about the stats in 2022:
My writing stats for 2021, best time to post on DEV and plans for 2022-2023 [over 250 articles planned]
GrahamTheDev γ» Jan 3 '22 γ» 8 min read
I don't know if it's still relevant in 2023, but it might give you some hints.
Cheers.
Thanks for your thoughts. I've been blogging on my own website since 2005, and indeed have built up a following and a newsletter. I added DEV to the mix a few years ago because it allowed more new readers to discover my articles.
What's changed is that, with so few views, it unfortunately just doesn't seem worth the time and effort to cross post here anymore.
I guess you could automate that, but, again, that's ultimately your decision.
How did you create your website, I mean every time I go to a website builder, they just give me templates, I want to know how to create a website with code, thank you.
Great question. I actually recorded a lot of it for YouTube seven years ago when I first developed the site. It has evolved a LOT and changed platforms and libraries drastically. Still, feel free to watch if you're interested in some (somewhat outdated) details: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BS-vMJkWgo&list=PLF5ApzZV2CSVBWlaX2d9rNUrBkg08pipy
These days, I would highly recommend using Glitch, it's a great way to get started with web dev without having to worry about web hosting and the rest of it: glitch.com/
Hello, you didn't get what I mean, I mean that I know how to use HTML and CSS, but I need a Hosting Platform in which I don't use templates, I use my own code(and free) then I can release the website(portfolio). And Thank You.
My blog is hosted as a static site with Cloudflare Pages, which is free.
Hey, I don't know if you're still looking, but check out SoloLearn, it can teach you HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, the building blocks of webpages.
For personal use, temporarily, while learning, making a webpage is as easy as creating a
page.htmlfile.Thank you, I know how to use HTML, and CSS, and I am now learning JavaScript, but I need a platform on which I can host my website without templates only using my own coding. Also, I am just 13, so I can't pay for that website. Thank you.
As I said in my reply to your other reply, SoloLearn doesn't cost money, unless you're looking at some premium plan.
Take a look at GitHub pages.
Here is my website, it uses GitHub pages, which works adequately enough for static webpages.
Thank you a lot, you helped and I appreciate it!!!ππ
You're welcome.
It seems pretty hard, did you learn it from a tutorial for the deployment? if you have, I will be pleasured if you send me the link.
I don't remember how I learned. I viewed the documentation they had and I found it helpful.
In any case, watch this YouTube video, How to Host a Website on GitHub Pages | Step-By-Step.
I did the reverse. I switched quite a few blogs during my career and I kept most of them. People still find me through an older blog like talktotheduck.dev and then locate my newer writings.
I use the new blog and republish here with a canonical. The trick is to wait a week between the original publication and the new one. If you unpublish here you might create an SEO problem where the search engine won't know the true original. Those initial posts are gone in terms of SEO and that's fine. Newer content can go in your home blog and you can even automate the republishing.
I too noticed a shift in the signal to noise ratio that correlates with the rise of ChatGPT. But it applies to all my blogs in all the other channels too. I think this will improve with time as people tire of the ChatGPT generated drivel.
Sounds like you need to workb on your seo
Yeah exactly, this will help the SEO of my website.
You forgot to unpublish this one
LOL, I just wrote this as a placeholder in case anyone went to my profile. It turned out to be a very popular placeholder.
Why would you unpublish everything? That's silly.
Yeah I should have explained that, good question. Despite doing the rel=canonical thing, if you search on some of the blog posts on DuckDuckGo (mostly) but also Google, DEV still shows up as a search result oftentimes. So I'd rather just have my blog show up in those results. YMMV
Some stuff doesn't go away, even if you unpublish it. D:
What do you mean? All the articles are 404 now as far as I can see.
I mean some search engines will keep certain things indexed, even if they should not be.
A good example is DuckDuckGo keeping some Tweets I made indexed even though I deleted my Twitter account like a year or so ago.
Yeah, you're right about that. I'm hopeful they'll eventually link to the version of the articles that continues to live on my website instead.
:(
I am not sure it is the right action for the long term
I'm not sure either, but in the long term I'd like my website to be where all my articles live, so it makes sense I think.