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Discussion on: Why Dev.to is winning over Hashnode?

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sandeepgk profile image
Sandeep Panda • Edited

Hi Sarthak! The founder of Hashnode here. I am sure you have put a great amount of effort into writing this article. So, thanks for that.

First of all, you need to understand that we are a platform for Q&A and are not geared so much towards articles. I understand dev.to also lets you ask questions, but I think there are more articles/stories than questions. But from the perspective of Hashnode this is going to change soon.

You have raised some valid questions and concerns. So, kudos for that. But some of your points are incorrect.

  • Most of the questions on Hashnode enjoy healthy debate and interactions. Some questions get 200+ answers. So, I don't agree with the "Zero Interaction" part. But yes, news pieces and articles have less interactions and upvotes. So, we are going to work on that.

  • To understand the primary value proposition of Hashnode, please visit this old discussion thread.

  • Also, we never charged money for job postings. You might have missed the "Launch Offer" part.

However, I agree with the rest of your points. We did a series of mistakes over the last 1 year. Instead of focusing on community building and growth, we prioritised something else (I am going to blog about that separately). That's why the engagement level is not that high. But hey, we are humans! I can promise that we are going to work on this and fix it.

We are going to work on improving the platform and plan to stay in the dev space for a while. :)

I appreciate the kind of work dev.to founders have done here and therefore kudos to them. They are doing a great job and we are happy that developers are going to benefit from both the platforms.

We never consider dev.to to be our competitor. We're not comparing ourselves to anyone - we're being ourselves, and we'll grow in our own direction.

Thanks for putting this piece together. :) Stay tuned for our upcoming plans and announcements.

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sarthology profile image
Sarthak Sharma

Hey Sandeep, highly appreciate that you came to join the discussion that's what we need. We need this kind of openness and collaborative growth in our community. As you rightly said in the end developers should be benefited from both the platforms.
But because you're here and for the sake of discussion there are few things I want to mention.

  • I'm not a daily user on Hashnode.
  • Most of the things I mentioned above were the first impression I had about Hashnode.
  • Also when I joined the platform I didn't get a feel that it's a QA focused platform like Stackoverflow is. But it was giving me a Dev.to kind of a feeling.
  • So as you were saying you guys developing some new features, are you planning to be a different than dev.to or better. (Trick question)😉

Thanks love to hear more from you.

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rajeeva profile image
Rajeev Jayaswal

Fast forward to Jan - 2021. I recently came to know about Hashnode and Dev.to - both looks great, and I find Hashnode to be better than dev.to for posting/writing articles.

Hashnode also allows the data to be fetched/posted via API endpoint which I think is not there for dev.to.

The user interface of hashnode looks far better while reading article.

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redbar0n profile image
Magne

(I am going to blog about that separately)

Did you ever blog about that? I couldn't find it on your hashnode blog. It would be interesting to read your learnings.