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.
Latest comments (50)
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.
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.
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.
Great comparision !!
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 :)
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
Rome was not built in a day
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 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.
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.
Did you ever blog about that? I couldn't find it on your hashnode blog. It would be interesting to read your learnings.
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.
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.
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