So as some of you might already be familiar with, Dev.to and Hashnode both are online communities for developers, or at least that's how they represent themselves.
Hashnode:
Dev.to:
But Dev.to is quickly gaining a lead over Hashnode as we can clearly see in the following stats.
I thought this would make for an interesting case study to understand why this is happening. So I tried to dig deeper and this lead me to discover some crucial points that can help young entrepreneurs in making great products and make them work. Let's get started.
It's not about making a lot of features, it's about making a few key features work.
My friend introduced Hashnode to me stating that it's a platform with the best design ever made for any community. Of course, that couldn't be the sole reason for me to leave dev.to, but I signed up just for the sake of curiosity to actually check out their product. The platform has got a great UI, no doubt in that; but after spending a little more time on that, you will find the problem.
The design of Dev.to is very simple. They've got Blog, Discussions, AMAs and challenges, everything that Hashnode has got, but the starting point for all of them is the same - "WRITE A POST" - and everything is separated by tags. That's how they've made things simpler for the users. On the other hand, on Hashnode, the user gets overwhelmed by a lot of options during the sign-up process itself. There is a separate page to add everything, and a slightly different design also.
Communities are built on interaction, and you will always be the first one to start it.
I am a huge fan of this article "Product Hunt’s Rise" by Ben Gelsey. This explains how RYAN HOOVER actually made the Product Hunt community work. If you observe carefully, you will notice that Ben Halpern is doing something similar.
What's the first thing you see when you surf Hashnode? "ZERO INTERACTIONS". Most of the top posts have either 1 or no upvotes, people rarely comment on each other's posts. They just drop by to promote their stuff and then leave.
When you start your community, obviously the interaction won't start by itself. You have to start it so that people can join in, too. See how many comments and posts Ben has published so far.
"Develop an app like you yourself are the first and last user."
Ben lives that mantra. I see him posting comments on almost every great discussion or blog. Sometimes he is the first one to comment, even when there is nobody else there.
Hashnode's founder, meanwhile, has posted only 15 articles in a span of 4 years, and he doesn't even answer direct questions asked to him on his profile.
(I'm sure he's a busy man and has better things to do.)
But you can clearly see the difference.
Another trick that Dev.to have up their sleeves is these cool buttons. I don't know if you know this or not but each user can click all three buttons and that will count as 3 upvotes/likes/hearts. I think it's a pretty cool trick to seed the initial interaction with the post as an author himself can click all the three buttons. That means no matter what, each post can always have 3 likes on it. So "NO DEAD POSTS"!
Show ❤️ to initial users and make them feel special
Dev.to have this awesome weekly top series. They post weekly articles dedicated specifically to last week's top posts and comments. Yes, you read it right - COMMENTS.
They never forget to tweet daily about top posts from each category. This not only helps authors reach more readers but also helps them in getting more followers and interaction on their posts. Now that's how you empower your users.
They keep coming up with new ways to make their users feel special. For example, last week, because of my post "Are we Developers helping Google to build an unstoppable monopoly?", I discovered that Dev.to two hardcore fans have created a podcast where they discuss posts from Dev.to itself 😱. It's awesome, check it out.
These might seem like small things to some of you, but these are the very things that create true fans - not just users, but true fans. These true fans are your free marketing army. You can see a clear difference when you visit Hashnode's twitter page. You will find no interaction with their userbase there either. No surprise that there is a huge difference between the number of followers of both platforms.
Offer more than you take
The habit of over-delivering is the key to success. If you are a regular user, you may have noticed there are various posts by Dev.to team that can help you find people that you need.
You can find contributors:
You can hire people:
And these are just additional benefits besides the amazing community. I have myself found some new friends in posts like these. Hashnode used to charge for posting jobs on their platform, by the way, and they only recently made that feature free.
If your platform does what it promises to do, it's a useful platform, but these small features are the real gems that make people love your platform.
Be Open, Be Modest
We all know that Dev.to is open source, but another interesting fact is that they are a very open company as well. I mean posting-about-their-own-weaknesses kinda open. This not only gives them contributors but also users that don't hesitate to point out bugs in the comment section.
Last week in a discussion on my post, Ben stated something that really represents the core value of Dev.to - "Modesty is key". I think that's why Dev.to is open source. It shows that they are very open about their goals, i.e. they want to build a COMMUNITY for DEVELOPERS.
Conclusion
I'm not saying that Hashnode is dead. I'm sure they can learn something from their talented competitors and improve. Because in the end, developers will benefit from it too.
Thanks for reading this, guys. I hope this can be a good learning experience for you like it was for me. Building products is easy; building meaningful products, on the other hand, is where things get interesting.
If I missed something, feel free to share that in the comment section. If you liked my post, share it with your friends and hit that ❤️ or all three 😂.
Btw I'm on Medium as well. Check it out here.
Top comments (50)
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.
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.
Thanks love to hear more from you.
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.
Did you ever blog about that? I couldn't find it on your hashnode blog. It would be interesting to read your learnings.
Hey Sarthak! I completely agree with all the points here.
Finding a community where you feel like you can give back can be really hard - it definitely was for me. When I first started off my programming career I tried taking part in communities like:
And so on....
But then one day last year, my current roommate told me about a Twitter account called The Practical Dev, and how they were planning to make a site as a community for developers. I immediately made an account after seeing the huge following on Twitter to see what the hype was about.
One thing I'd like to note is that none of the sites I mentioned before were as accepting as dev.to.
This is the only online code community where I actually feel a strong desire to be an active member.
This is the only online code community that has led me to make MANY online and IRL friends.
This is the only online code community where I felt the desire to meet the founders in person.
This site is freakin' awesome.
Also one other thing, while I really appreciate you mentioning our podcast, I want to clarify that Dan and I are not part of the dev.to team.
We're just members of the community that liked it so much we decided to take time to make a podcast about it! We're some of those true fans in the dev.to army you were talking about ;)
*salutes*
We've got the true OG squad here. You da real MVP.
Oh, I didn't know that you guys are independent. But I still love what you guys are doing.
+infinite on this one :D Couldn't agree more
I really enjoyed reading this article. Thanks! It makes me feel better about the world knowing that in the midst of all the problems and issues, there is a community of developers out there helping each other out.
By the way, I didn't know that you could hit the three buttons at once. I always thought the maximum was two: one bookmark and either a ❤ or a 🦄.
Haha, So that's a lifehack of the day then 😂
I think there are some small adjustments we need to make in reaction land.
One thing: I want unicorns to be more rare and special. I think so far we’ve been sort of living in an awkward in-between phase with this component of the site.
and here goes the lifehack 😃
@ben perhaps implementing some sort of post reaction, similar to Facebook, would make them more exclusive. A simple tap would be a heart press or hover, to see the reaction panel where you can choose the unicorn.
Yeah I think something like that might be the approach. I also like how Slack does reactions.
There's also more we can do to provide ways to search and sort through past reactions, to give them more personal use. Though that could complicate things.
Either way, we've left the "reaction" concept pretty abstract at the data layer and there's definitely some interesting things we could do in the long run. We used to also have the 🤔 and 🙌 reactions but got rid of them to make room for some other functionality. Eventually we'll settle on the best approach for all of this.
The fact that this is a PWA means I can use it on my phone with ease. Here are the chrome audits for both sites.
dev.to clearly has a little work to do with accessability but having so many of these near maxed out makes the experience good for lots of people with lots of different sorts of web access.
Yeah, our accessibility score has been a bit of whack-a-mole. We've been up and down at different times. I think we're trending in the right direction, but we've had some missteps. Over the next while I think we'll be able to hack away and get closer to a consistent 90-100 in this area.
I'll try and make raise issues to help the upwards trend 😁
This is a really thoughtful post Sarthak!
I want to add more thoughts later once I get back to my desktop machine. 😄
I know, what I mentioned is not even 10% of the efforts you guys are putting in the community. Would love to hear your thoughts eagerly 😊
Okay, here goes brain-dump time. If I tried to offer a cohesive response I'd be here all day trying to get it right. But thanks a lot for the platform to wax philosophical a bit about what's working and what's not.
Anyway, that's a bunch of random thoughts. Not sure it's the important stuff, but it's stuff. We're still a pretty small operation, but we are growing and it's great that what we're doing is becoming so important for folks' lives/careers/interests.
Happy coding ❤️
I'll admit I first followed dev on twitter to get the free stickers and over time I starting being drawn into the community.
Great post! I haven't been a DEV user for long now but I am loving this community. Lots of great posts, respectful users, clean UI, ...
I have found 2 bugs since joining and after reporting them I got an answer very quickly and they immediately looked into it, it didn't even matter where I informed them about it.
Funny to see my article in the GIF 😂
I'd like to note that although Sandeep doesn't actively post, he is constantly active on the community. As a member, he constantly recommends other people answer questions (rather than himself). He also actively edits my posts if I forget to add tags and adds them for me 😅 I'm sure he doesn't want to draw too much attention to himself vs other more public C-level execs.
Hashnode has been trying hard to adapt and grow with the changing web tides. They tried a program recently called Hashnode Elites or something where top users were invited to a private chat with founders/team members in order to offer feedback on the site growth. They closed the program recently (don't think it did well), and they've been making a lot of incremental changes to their UI to improve the UX for users. Over the course of a couple months they've made a significant number of minor tweaks that improve the aesthetics.
I think there are other key issues with Hashnode.
Dev.to overall seems better with their PR and marketing game, and Hashnode seems like the perfect example of the app with everything that doesn't know how to sell itself.
Thanks, Ryosuke! Great points. I just wrote my thoughts here: dev.to/sandeepgk/comment/77b2
Overall, I agree with your points. And the way we handled the "toxic community member" was definitely not optimal. But I can promise that we are working on the above-mentioned things and are going to fix the issues. :)
I was excepting this, a review from a real Hashnode user. 😊
Thanks for pointing out some other insightful points.
Lots of great thoughts Ryosuke. I think you hit the nail on the head with a lot of this stuff.
Nobody on our team has a CS degree or any formal web design training. (Of course, I hope as the team grows, we will have some folks with these types of educations!)
Our team mostly has done a lot of random kinds of work which really helps us do well what we do well. We have backgrounds in customer support, hospitality, marketing, inventory management, and lots of other random things. I think this is a big part of what we do well.
Sarthak, you’re 2/2 for thought-provoking posts! I think the common thread I see here is a core set of values (maybe articulated, maybe more fluid) and a focus on sustainable community growth over “growing the user base.” Its anecdotal but my feeling is that the growth of this community has recently accelerated significantly, and seemingly organically, on the basis of a good experience.
I think a key point in the next stage of growth might be like... “second order features”. In my mind, that’s members using basic features to get creative and put out things that are more firmly rooted in the community and in a more consistent voice, rather than isolated blog posts . That’s probably poorly articulated, I’m on my way to work haha, but hopefully the gist makes sense. I see “series” playing into this. It’s actually where @milkstarz and I got the idea for our conversations. We’re some of just some of those “true fans” you’re talking about.
Completely agree with you there. Also Ben is handling it very well. Rest on the job will be done by the true fans like you.
Opening the Hashnode home page alone in my Chrome leads to my laptop overheating with processes consuming 100% of my CPU power! Making the whole site effectively unusable.
What is it so important to it that needs so much computer power?
Chrome
you had me at:
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