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Cover image for React sees a dip in downloads on npm 📉. What's going on?
Saurabh Rai
Saurabh Rai Subscriber

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React sees a dip in downloads on npm 📉. What's going on?

For those who don't know 😂
React is a JavaScript library for creating user interfaces.

React is one of the most popular JavaScript libraries in the world, but it saw a dip in downloads this week. Could be a number of factors. Also, it might be something going on with npm.js as well. Who knows 🤯🤯??

Check for yourself: https://www.npmjs.com/package/react

Or maybe all the people are cooking something tasty bun, that they forgot to react? 😂

Here's an image to enjoy 👇

Panda Reacts to See dip in downloads

Top comments (33)

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nathan_tarbert profile image
Nathan Tarbert

🖖I come in peace🖖🤣

My guess is it's an incident with NPM's count like the one in 2018 but haven't seen a press release yet so your guess is as good as mine.

What do you think @srbhr?

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pizofreude profile image
Pizofreude

I was tempted to make a full pun intended, I held back to maintain peace 🤣

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srbhr profile image
Saurabh Rai

Go on, we love your puns @pizofreude

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pizofreude profile image
Pizofreude

Ahahaha, it was a bit too dark for public space in DevTo. I'll do one better next time with more user friendly on public space :)

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manuartero profile image
Manuel Artero Anguita 🟨 • Edited

+1

@angular/core (for instance) :

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srbhr profile image
Saurabh Rai

LOL, As an angular developer myself. I won't be surprised to see this dip. 😂😂

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srbhr profile image
Saurabh Rai • Edited

I think it's

  1. Either a buy or some maintenance going on.
  2. They're trying to reduce pull by AI bots. As they're using this data to train and learn. Ref
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overflow profile image
overFlow

lol number one hit me differently cos i usually check out currency and stock charts lol...When you said :"its either a buy lol"

hahahahaha

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srbhr profile image
Saurabh Rai

Maybe this what you are saying or something different is going on. 😂

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joelbonetr profile image
JoelBonetR 🥇 • Edited

Let's wait few weeks to see what the data looks like.

The bad thing is that npm does not normalize the graph once the "bug is fixed" then you face this odd bumps (up or down) like Vue on Dec 11, 2022 😅

npmtrends.com/react-vs-vue

Data dramas happen, I'd expect them to discard the wrong stuff and draw a straight line between the consistent data points if that's about giving market share representative data. It's not though, it just represents -allegedly- the amount of downloads from their servers for specific packages, hence it's not agnostic to botting and mirroring plus there's few reasons for them to normalise data output.

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srbhr profile image
Saurabh Rai

Yupp, let's wait and watch. My take is that new frameworks have started to pull people away. And we'll see enterprise customers testing such stuff as well.

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joelbonetr profile image
JoelBonetR 🥇 • Edited

Yup, still it's a huge drop that can't be explained by that IMHO.

React is quite on the top of the leadership in terms of FE development and the future of it itself, high level of maturity and a great deal of people proficient using it.

Vercel also adds a ton of muscle with Next JS so... whoever is in the tribe of react haters hold your horses.
We'll eventually swap react for something else, but doing an objective analysis of the market this time it's not just yet 😂 we're honestly far from that.

On the other hand this doesn't explain the drop in Express.

First question I tried to answer is: does this drop correlates with an equivalent increase in alternatives?

Taking a quick look the answer is a big NO!

Checked Solid.js, Marko, Svelte, Angular, Astro, Next, Vue... and they all got a huge -percentile- drop. Also checked Fastify as a counterpart for Express and also got a drop.

If you ask me either npm has a bug on data gathering or some mirrors have been closed.

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srbhr profile image
Saurabh Rai

@joelbonetr Yes, I think so. But here's another comment made on reddit yesterday. This can be better bot protection. All of these bots are learning the codes and stuff. Comment

Also, what if those bots already have access to our DEV blogs ??

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joelbonetr profile image
JoelBonetR 🥇

well, dev blogs are public so you sure can access them through any scrapping process for ingestion.
That being said I don't know what would be the result if you train a model on all npm libraries 😂 There are quite a few of them that are buggy as hell, bad structured, overengineered and so on and so forth, not to speak of the deprecated ones.

We can theorise but we might never know unless npm throw an official communicate

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srbhr profile image
Saurabh Rai

That being said I don't know what would be the result if you train a model on all npm libraries 😂 There are quite a few of them that are buggy as hell, bad structured, overengineered and so on and so forth, not to speak of the deprecated ones.

Codex was trained on GitHub. So, same situation there as well. 😂

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joelbonetr profile image
JoelBonetR 🥇

That's relieving, isn't it? 😂😂

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srbhr profile image
Saurabh Rai

We get to keep our job ✨

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felixdev9 profile image
Felix

Bun and Astro takes over. That's it.

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srbhr profile image
Saurabh Rai

Well, that's not the case. There's another post on DEV about how we never learned from Yarn, and that's the same case with BUN. I don't know, I haven't tried it yet. I'm an Angular guy.

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nevodavid profile image
Nevo David

it's like S&P 500 - there is a drop, but in the end it will be greater :)

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srbhr profile image
Saurabh Rai

Hmm . . 🤔. Everything looks good after a drop 😂

Image description

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overflow profile image
overFlow

buy the bottom....I thought i was the only one who wanted to buy that like pronto...lol

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sreno77 profile image
Scott Reno

Maybe they're giving Vue a try?

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srbhr profile image
Saurabh Rai

Vue is also down 😂😂

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nathan_tarbert profile image
Nathan Tarbert

Same drop for Express.
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srbhr profile image
Saurabh Rai

Looks like the E & R from MERN stack is down. 😂😂

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nathan_tarbert profile image
Nathan Tarbert

That's the way it seems :)

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hussam22 profile image
Hussam-22

Maybe because all developer downloaded react and no one left 🤣

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srbhr profile image
Saurabh Rai

Dude, this is the most funniest reply!!
You don't know how hard I laughed.

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srbhr profile image
Saurabh Rai

This pest is everywhere. @sloan Pest Control please.

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julianlasso profile image
Julian Lasso 🇨🇴

Strange, it seems to be some problem in the NPM servers because that kind of behavior is normal but for the months of December.

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srbhr profile image
Saurabh Rai

This isn't December though. 👀

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sunui profile image
sun

Chinese National Day Holiday is coming...