https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/23/the-year-social-networks-were-no-longer-social/
Tech Crunch has this article about how FB and presumably all of the non-specific topic sites don't have the same feel and aren't generally as good for communicating or community building.
dev.to is the best new private community for software developers and it came to my mind first while reading this article. I never could get into the discussions or over the poor UI of the phpBB forums of which the author writes. It was just too much.
Thanks dev.to for being the best new topic site and filling a much needed hole.
Top comments (1)
I agree. 😄
I think this article hits on a lot of the reasons we felt there was a need for dev.to in the world in the first place.
I also could never get over the UI of phpBB etc. However, we draw a lot of inspiration for dev.to from basic forums of yesteryear. The web has evolved passed those as the central communication forum in terms of design and user experience, but there is a warmth that was lost.
In 2019 we plan on leaning more into these ideas and massage the nuances of what makes these environments right.
We are also an open source project and will at some point in 2019 release features which will allow people/organizations to stand up their own instances of this platform for different interests. I've been really into baking lately and I'd love to stumble upon the dev.to for baking. 🧁
Not only are monolithic social networks difficult to scale socially, it also means huge data hoarders. We are really excited about the idea of more small and medium sized players if only to break up the data hoarders.
Open source is trending up, monolithic social media and data hoarders are trending down.