I recently claimed that we might look back on the 2010s decade and early 2020 years as a golden age of the internet, collaboration and information exchange. The good old days when tools had evolved, users were still ambitious to share and collaborate online for free and knowledge didn't get lost in AI chats ending in dubious almost-good recommendations below the quality of the once-good-now-outdated StackOverflow answers and crafted tutorials that the LLM had been trained on.
Why DEV?
I discovered the DEV community when I got disappointed about Medium's lack of quality and StackOverflow's gatekeeping. I had criticised DEV's badges as rewarding quantity over quality, but DEV's challenges focus more on quality.
No good questions anymore?
Apart from developer-focused forums and communities, more general platforms include SubStack, Reddit, Quora and LinkedIn globally. In Germany, Gutefrage.net ("good question network") has acquired several contenders and its desperation for clicks and content attracted dubious propaganda and adolescent Q&A to an extent that its TrustPilot score dropped below 2 which is very sad for a platform built upon a good idea and an active community providing questions, answers and ideas for free for decades.
Is StackOverflow "almost dead"?
Image source, inspiration and further reading: Stack overflow is almost dead in The Pulse by The Pragmatic Engineer Gergely Orosz on Substack.
On a much higher level, StackOverflow has built its reputation on the free contributions of skilled experts since it obsoleted Experts Exchange nearly twenty years ago. However, even without contemporary AI and Google's zero-click summaries, it was seen past its best days with decreasing contributions and with upvoted answers getting outdated as time went by.
Blaming AI for a Self-Inflicted Decline?
It's easy to blame AI for lack of user engagement, but bad UX and wrong business decisions play just as big a role in my opinion. Toxic social media algorithms have destroyed Web 2.0 and Web3's ideas of a decentralized non-commercial Web 1 revival never lived up to its promise, at least not yet.
Although AI can help naive users publish a lot of content without learning and researching before publishing, AI can also help to detect its own slop and distinguish quality content from spam. But it needs constant human curation and high-quality authored by human beings based on their authentic experience to keep up a high level of AI output. Otherwise, that will deteriorate just like prior knowledge management strategies started out promising but deteriorated without continuous maintenance.
Curiosity and Curation: Growth without Losing Quality
DEV has grown a lot, and it is full of dubious content both by beginners who are welcome to share their stories and learn in public, and by spammy marketing authors often mixing actual value with sloppy filler content and opinionated links to their clients' services. DEV's tag filters don't really work. I used "negative subscriptions" to ignore content with the #ai hashtag for example, but I keep seeing those posts everywhere every day, and we keep discussing it. Nevertheless, DEV shows me relevant and inspiring high-quality content by developers that I follow and by those trending or getting featured in curated best-of-last-week's lists.
DEV vs. StackOverflow, Wikipedia and Blog Platforms
In conclusion, what's different here? DEV grows, while others decline. DEV has more content, more users, more engagement at the same time that users turn their back on StackOverflow. More general blog platforms might have more active users, but also more slop and they're not much fun anymore. Wikipedia, the most popular general knowledge platform, has managed to maintain high quality through gatekeeping, like StackOverflow risking to turn away potential contributors who don't easily fit their quality criteria or don't have enough time or priorities to spend unpaid time and effort contributing to a knowledge base which, in Wikipedia's case, is entirely nonprofit and succeeded in staying relevant and up-to-date enough for decades while other platforms rose and fell.
A Medium without a Message?
Medium has hidden most of its content behind paywalls, even content contributet for free by volunteering hobby authors, and it has encouraged writers to start ever post with a huge poster image usually taken from Unsplash or other free stock image libraries. DEV's integrated Google's Nano Banana AI image generator has created dubious artwork mostly following a neon retrofuturistic aesthetic that at least sets its post apart from other blogging platforms at first sight. I still use Medium to publish German versions of my Substack posts.
A Stack without Overflow
Substack is praised as an independent alternative, but I totally dislike its pushy user experience, constantly asking me to support, share, upgrade, recommend or post, contribute to a twitter-style comment timeline and accept cookies on every single one of their distinct subdomains. I don't get many views or followers there, but I continue to use it for its alleged search engine marketing value.
IndieWeb Posse: The Blogosphere Web
I also consistently publish on my own weblog again, which is even more disappointing regarding regular visitors, but then again, I don't need quantity when I don't sell ads. Open Mind Culture is an independent, personal, ad-free blog that does get feedback and domain authorit without striving to attract the masses.
Conclusion: Last but not Least
Last, but not least, DEV. I get tired of reading and writing on DEV from time to time, but I keep coming back. I was critical to DEV's badges and voting system. I was skeptical about their Google AI collaboration. I got annoyed by spammy listicles. I don't like all of the posts that I wrote in the past, and I did edit some and deleted others, but I kept most as legitimate historical documents that might feel helpful or entertaining in the eyes of future readers.
Top comments (64)
I think you're pretty spot on with this evaluation.
If DEV has had a decline in community quality and content it is not now.
We actually did suffer a decline, and you know what: I believe almost every reason for that was self-inflicted.
Our current trajectory post-decline has been really great, and to start 2026 we are actually seeing a huge improvement in overall quality.
Slop, and lots of other issues, still need to be addressed, but the current reinforcing cycle we're on is very much a net positive and we hope/expect to reach all-time highs in objective and subjective quality in the next few years.
I can only speak from my own experience, but it’s a long one.
I’m genuinely passionate about knowledge sharing — and not just for a few months. I’ve been blogging for over 15 years. I have my own blog (now running on Astro, after years on WordPress), I’ve tried Medium, and yet I’ve never felt as much at home anywhere as I do on DEV.
Sure, there’s some low-quality or “slop” content. But that’s not specific to DEV. It’s mostly tied to individuals who act without scruples — chasing a few dollars, pushing shady services, sometimes outright scams. They’re on DEV, but they’re also on every other platform with a good reputation and a welcoming community. In reality, they’re everywhere, down to the smallest corners of the internet. I even deal with them on a Google Cloud Run project where the only thing they can actually do is cost me money.
And alongside that, there are truly fantastic authors on DEV. People who genuinely contribute to the developer community, who bring real value — to the community at large and to me personally. Many of them aren’t elsewhere anymore, or not in the same way.
I’ve also noticed that comment spam is filtered quite effectively. I read your article, and independently observed the same thing myself. And then there are the content moderators — which I’m part of. If we all keep playing our role and acting responsibly, I’m convinced DEV can only keep getting better.
Finally, a sincere thank you to Ben, Jess, and everyone involved in building and maintaining this inspiring platform. What you’ve created really matters — and it shows.
I think you're missing a point though. I know people who live in an area where the minimum wage is 350 pesos per day, or about $7-8. These people can have a pretty decent living if they can get up to $20 a day but if even 30 minutes of posting gets them $5, it's a huge win for them.
The economics state that this MUST continue because there are too many people, too many countries that benefit from a low-effort creation. "Slop" content to you might be someone else's dinner
I understand the economic reality you’re describing, and I don’t dismiss it at all. For some people, even a few dollars earned online can genuinely improve their day-to-day life. That’s real, and it deserves empathy.
But I also don’t think financial hardship automatically makes every type of content acceptable everywhere. There’s an important distinction between people trying to earn from honest participation on a platform, and content that’s unrelated to the community’s purpose — or worse, tied to activities that are illegal or harmful in many places. Selling or reselling accounts, promoting questionable gambling schemes, or pushing services that violate platform rules isn’t just “low-effort” content. It can create real risks for users and for the platform itself.
So to me, this isn’t really about judging individuals or their circumstances. It’s about maintaining the integrity of a shared space. A community platform only works if there are some boundaries: relevance, legality, and a basic level of trust. Without those, the environment deteriorates for everyone — including the many people who are trying to earn something online in honest ways.
I think it’s entirely possible to hold both ideas at once: empathy for people navigating difficult economic conditions, and a clear expectation that platforms remain focused on their purpose and free from scams or illegal promotion. Those two things don’t have to be in conflict. In the long run, keeping communities healthy and trustworthy is what allows them to remain viable spaces for everyone who depends on them — financially or otherwise.
It must be very difficult to balance the community and content with the very real practicality of running a business, employing staff and the like - I know you've had difficult choices along the way there. This is still the place I read most tech content, and I think the corner is turned. The feed algorithm seems much improved, too. I remain very glad Dev exists.
I think the integration of AI images really hasn't helped. I mean, I know that's what a lot of people were going to do anyway, but now it just looks like every post is slop, even if it isn't.
Just passing by after a while. I stopped posting when you guys decided that mixing politics with a technical platform was a good idea, is it safe to assume these are totally or partially the self-inflicted bits?
More than two years have passed since it peaked in a way that reading the feed was very uncomfortable and unhinged. How's the thing going now? Which efforts and measures have you guys taken to address this?
Politicians decide what laws are and can criminalize you overnight where something you did yesterday was legal and today is a felony. They decide what you're allowed to say, how much taxes you pay, etc.
"Don't be political" is literally impossible because eventually everything leads back to the man in charge, and he is usually flanked by armed men enforcing those charges. Whether the UK, Thailand, or Costa Rice, they all have rules you follow or suffer from
and yet each individual can decide how deep they wanna suck and to whom.
I can understand that, if you're an individual in a place without free speech the best bet may be leaving, but from the standpoint of a digital company, (which can change the HQs to anywhere in the world if necessary) in a country with free speech, if you endorse a message while erasing the visibility of the contrary opinion that's not a "ooh we couldn't do anything poor us" but a "I'll use my company to amplify propaganda knowingly" kind of situation, cuz otherwise the impact would have been minimum so I don't buy this idea at all.
Dev.to forever! and Wikipedia - and then Reddit and Quora - and still SO as well ...
Medium, no not really - ever after they introduced the paywall, and most articles gained ridiculous sensationalist click-bait headers, aiming to entice readers to sign up (and pay) based on some sort of "FOMO" ;-)
None of those sites are good for asking questions. I have tried correcting Wikipedia articles that got reverted almost immediately. I have been banned from subreddits because other subreddits I participated in apparently have a beef together - I had no clue but was punished.
Grokipedia is perhaps the best challenger for Wikipedia specifically but even then its missing images, and doesn't have user generated content yet like Quora or Reddit
"None of those sites are good for asking questions ... and doesn't have user generated content" - but that's not what Wikipedia is meant for - it's meant to be a pretty carefully curated online encyclopedia, purely a knowledge base that tries to be as factual as possible - not a social media site where anyone can dump his/her opinion or "hot take" about something ...
Grokipedia, give me a break, that's full of hard-right Musk propaganda (look up the article about George Floyd and compare it with Wikipedia's article), and probably AI slop as well - Grokipedia is a joke, it's an insult to compare it with Wikipedia ...
Musk hates Wikipedia because he thinks it's "woke", but it isn't - Wikipedia just tries to be as factual and objective as it can, it emphasis facts and objective truth, but persons of a certain political inclination tend to dislike those things ;-)
I think the main difference between Stackoverflow and DEV is the format. Stackoverflow is a public FAQ while DEV is a forum.
A lot of people, moved to AI for answers, and that is why the public FAQ format is dying.
For me the forum format has less of a threshold than repository issues or a chat server to communicate with other people.
I'm bad at promoting myself, so a forum that already attracted people is a better fit for my ramblings and ravings than a blog.
It isn't a DEV only problem, and i wouldn't know how to get it right, but AI authors seem to be the biggest problem I encounter.
I don't care if my English is a little bit broken, but other people are not comfortable enough to write without the help of AI correction.
So in a lot of cases is very difficult to detect posts and comments written by people. My method is feeling if behind words there is a person or not, but that is not scalable or foolproof.
The reason I think it is a problem is because the content that is produced by AI authors is not going to fixed when they give wrong information.
As people we can have different opinions, but most of the time we correct wrong information because we want to spread good information.
Maybe the one thing DEV could take away from Moltbook is to have the option to identify as a person or an agent?
I have the same inclination when it comes to older posts, keep them as a snapshot in time. Sometimes that violates the good information spreading I mentioned before. But it shows a learning curve, and when following the learning curve I think it can show perspectives that are though of and dismissed with context.
I don't mind people laughing about old posts, most of the times they make me cringe. But it is the price I pay for progress.
Communities fade when signal drops and ego wins over curiosity. DEV still feels different because thoughtful posts and practical feedback get real attention here. Keeping that culture takes active effort from contributors, not just the platform.
Thanks for the article.
DEV community rocks, because it feels like a safe place to share our thoughts, learnings and see meaningful responses, no boasting, no flashy stuff. And even if we do not see a response to our articles or thoughts, it is acceptable (at least to me) because we got a chance to share :-)
I like DEV, I think it is currently the best out there. I terminated Medium for constantly showing me obscenely wrong "tips" and AI slop. DEV is better in that (although not perfect).
I am just not really conviced with the "followers" system. It currenly shows me I have over 3400. Most of them I got days after joining (hundreds daily) and I presume they are just some bots tracking "say hello" thread. It is not a big deal, but it is funny to have such a number and then I write new article and it barely gets 50 views in month. I would accept I am not so good in writing, but then I see clearly AI generated "comparsion" article getting a lot of attention. It is a bit frustrating after putting a lot of effort into my own work...
I don’t think DEV is dying — I think it’s going through an era transition, and those always look messy from the inside.
From my standpoint, DEV has actually been one of the most valuable developer outlets I’ve had access to — and that context matters. Where I’m from, there aren’t many (sometimes any) formal spaces where developers can show work, exchange ideas, or even feel like part of a wider technical culture. No meetups. No strong local forums. No consistent pipelines. If you have skills, you mostly carry them quietly.
DEV filled that gap.
Not just as a place to post, but as a structured environment:
challenges that push you to finish things
badges that act less like vanity metrics and more like momentum
competitions that force you to sharpen how you think, not just what you build
For me, those mechanics don’t reward noise — they reward showing up consistently. And that matters a lot when you don’t have an offline ecosystem reinforcing your growth.
I also don’t see DEV’s growth vs StackOverflow’s decline as “AI killed communities.” That feels like the lazy explanation. What actually shifts platforms is usually a mix of friction, identity, and agency.
If you look at past era changes — MySpace → Facebook, forums → Reddit, blogs → social feeds — the pattern is consistent:
people migrate where participation feels easier
where personality is allowed inside some structure
where newcomers don’t feel punished for being early in their learning curve
StackOverflow optimized for correctness and efficiency. DEV optimized for expression + learning in public. Wikipedia survives because it chose gatekeeping with a nonprofit mission. Medium stumbled because it blurred authorship, incentives, and ownership.
DEV sits somewhere different: it’s not perfect, but it gives developers room to be human while still operating inside reasonable guidelines. That balance is rare.
Yes, there’s spam. Yes, there’s AI slop. That’s not a DEV-only problem — that’s an internet-wide entropy problem. The real question is whether a platform can still surface signal, and for me, DEV still does — especially through curated challenges, featured posts, and communities you deliberately follow.
I think what we’re seeing isn’t community death, but community redefinition. People still want a space that feels like “us” — where they can flex ideas, bring personality, and grow without being instantly optimized out of relevance by algorithms or paywalls.
From where I’m standing, DEV isn’t collapsing — it’s becoming one of the few remaining places where developers can still arrive unfinished, and that’s exactly why I keep coming back.
The real risk isn’t growth.
It’s forgetting that communities don’t survive on traffic — they survive on belonging plus momentum.
So no, I don’t think DEV is dying.
I think it’s one of the last places still fighting to evolve without erasing the people inside it.
Disclaimer: I do quite like DEV and it has been a very convenient place for me to post a few articles of which I routinely email links to various people.
But, after a few years of visiting it routinely as a place to read and feel community I just gave it up as the noise to signal ratio was way too high. While part of that is simply a demographic mismatch, I think the main problem for me was the inability to filter out the flood of JavaScript topic content (plus perhaps some other user tropes, but honestly I can't see how those could be avoided).
This also meant it changed from being a place I would enthusiastically tell other people about, to something that I wouldn't, other than with links to my articles. Once in a while I come back for a look, but haven't had an impression that much has changed. Similarly I reduced my follows just to have fewer pending notifications on return visits.
To be clear, I only wish the site well (and Forem too but that's obviously a wider topic again). I've been online since bulletin boards of the 1980s and this is one of the best - and most approachable - designs I've seen over all these years. So I don't have an axe to grind here, I just thought I'd share how it had turned out for me - in case that helps in any way.
What really resonates with me is the idea that the decline of online communities didn’t start with AI – AI just pulled the curtain back. The rot began earlier with UX designed for addiction instead of learning, and business models that treated contributors like free raw material. StackOverflow didn’t die because people got lazy; it died because the platform slowly turned from a workshop into a courtroom where asking the “wrong” question felt like a misdemeanor.
DEV feels different because it still tolerates imperfection. Real learning is messy, repetitive, sometimes naïve. The old internet understood that; the new one demands polished expertise before you’ve even begun. Gatekeeping protects quality, sure – but too much of it sterilizes curiosity. Wikipedia survives because it has a clear mission. StackOverflow forgot its soul. DEV, at least for now, still acts like a neighborhood rather than a bureaucracy.
The real battle isn’t human vs AI. It’s curiosity vs metrics. If communities reward honest experience instead of volume, SEO glitter and “10 tips to 10x your life,” they’ll live. If not, we’ll all end up talking to algorithms about algorithms, wondering where the people went.
Interesting point, as AI can be just another useful or even necessary assistive techhnology. Using speech input to take notes while walking around with my old smartphone changes my writing style, and so do unsolicited AI answers when using search engines. Automated language services also may get us lost in translation or mistaken for being a bot while we're not.
Trying to distinguish humans from machines by heuristic signals might or might not work, but it might miss the point altogether. I know that some people are real and human because I have met them in real life, but that does not necessarily make their posts more valuable that those by sources unknown to me.
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