Online Community Demise and why DEV is Different (at least a little bit, I hope)

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didn't get lost in AI chats ending in dubious almost-good recommendations below the quality of the once-good-now-outdated StackOverflow answers and crafted tutorials that the LLM had been trained on. March 2026 **_Update_**: I wrote this post shortly before DEV announced its acquisition by [MLH (see: What does MLH stand for?)](https://dev.to/mellen/what-does-mlh-stand-for-2cbg). Nobody can predict the future, but we discussed the same dilemma when DEV announced its partnership with Google's AI team. At the time of writing, I was not aware how much quantity surged and engagement dropped during the past twelve months, due to spam and slop trying to exploit DEV's permissive publishing options. However, we had similar discussions earlier on as well, and the Dead Internet Theory has a point. Still, maybe that's just Sturgeon's law, and detecting meaning and relevance among similar noise is still a genuinely human curation ability. I didn't see a sellout either. I'm not against bigger companies aquiring smaller ones, at least not in general. I'd rather see more non-profit models like Wikipedia but that's rare and hard to achive in a capitalist system. From a pramgmatic perspective, what's the point of independence if the small communities can't survive independently? DEV, at least, seems to prefer the proverbial "driver seat" and have a say about their future before investors take over without asking questions, like we saw when Twitter became X or TumblR was temporarily renamed to Oath and never reclaimed its former role again - or StackOverflow desperately doing "experiments" deliberately giving up what made their site special. ## What's DEV.to and why does it matter? 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](https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-pulse-134) in The Pulse by The Pragmatic Engineer Gergely Orosz on Substack. On a much higher level, [StackOverflow](https://stackoverflow.com/) 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](https://en.wikipedia.org/), 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](https://ingosteinke.substack.com/), 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](https://www.open-mind-culture.org/) 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](https://dev.to/ingosteinke/stop-rewarding-quantity-20o8). 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.