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 repre...
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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:
I'd never heard of hashnode. But I guess I don't get out much.
On the other hand: those graphs from Alexa mean nothing to me. One has the Y-axis inverted from the other and they don't use the same scale. Is that how Alexa usually presents data?
I had to do a double take, but the y-axis is the same in both images. The top of the y-axis represents being the #1 most popular site in the world, and the scales are different because of the site rankings in the time period shown.
Me neither; I don't feel alone now.
I thought I'd mention what keeps bringing me back to dev.to is that I love their weekly (daily?) email newsletter that I often read posts from. It is interesting with hashnode that it's pretty easy to host your own blog using their platform.
This is really amazing research. I totally agree with you, especially how dev.to community is more interactive. This is very motivating even as a beginner learning how to code and posting their progress and what they have learnt in a post :)
Had never even heard of hashnode before this article..
To the point of the post, Hashnode really isn’t that popular despite having been around for a while now. So not surprising to have not heard of them.
I’d be curious to know what their sustainability model is.
Well here are my two cents on the matter. I didn't know Hashnode even existed before this post and I know dev.to for over 8 months already.
Can't really remember how I ended up finding dev.to (maybe it was through some articles on Medium or something...) but the tagline they had back then really resonated with me and I saw that the interface was really clean and streamlined and the registration process was very easy so I thought why not?
I was a ghost member just reading a couple articles for about 4 months until I found a post from (can't remember who xD) talking about all the benefits of being an active member and encouraging people to post or comment more frequently and I think that rekindled the fire I had about making community and putting myself out there even if others wouldn't.
And so this is
one of the few communities(the only one ) that inspires me to post things, even if I'm a newbie in this industry or at writing posts for that matter.This is the only place I'm able to meet such cool people with a lot of knowledge that have no problem sharing it and don't feel all high and mighty just 'cause they have "some" experience.
This is the only place where I'm actively looking for interesting things I can learn from and talk with the people who actually shared them, for those who don't know, I'm very detached (maybe careless?) to several things so I could join several forums, chat rooms and stuff but eventually forget about them and never come back only when I need something is that I would post something and then leave again.
Here I make a conscious effort to see what's going on and what's new even if I'm boggled down with things to do, I just find small windows of time to check the site (even when I can't login 'cause my employer ip blocked github hahaha)
Plus isn't it awesome that you can post comments or articles here while at the same time practice your Markdown skills??
I agree to that. The day I came across dev.to I've stopped using hashnode. They also updated the UI to an extent that it looks a very different website than what it was before. Plus dev.to is blazing fast to load and has a great PWA. And as you said the strength lies in the community. I get so hooked reading the posts/comments on dev.to that I don't take notice of the time.
I was never a fan of Communitys. I found out about dev.to through a simple Github explore. I had a Github account and so it was an instant join and access of all the features.
Really well done plattform and community. I am completely hooked by the helpfull people that inspired me for severel improvments for my career.
I am reading this article after this post has been published around six months. I get to know both of these site recently and almost all of the functionality is same in both web sites. Now hashnode also almost tend to write stories/articles. BTW, I think both platform provide nice experience to developers to publish their thought and idea on social media.
Wow, that’s nice. Seems like it’s time for part 2.
I hit all the buttons because I love this post!
hashnode is the worst platform for your blog. They had the worst support and UX(I literally tried to delete the account 5 times and it's always reset all the things). They also scam their ambassadors when they invite their friends for a fking t-shirt. Try other platforms. Piece.
Rome was not built in a day
Having a set of most hunble and kind founders who do A LOT OF WORK is a key behind Dev.to's success. Also there's a serious crack down against online harassment here. 👌
Thank you @ben @jess @peter
Now that I think about it, Hashnode has overcome all but one of the cons you explained in this article. Their signup process still lacks simplicity.
I just organically ended up on dev.to from a medium or a self-hosted blog that crosposted here. And I love it.
I've never heard of Hashnode until this post.
Great comparision !!