Comment by skilled | Hacker News Reader

Comment by skilled | Hacker News Reader

It's very plausible that this is the first step of migrating CSS-Tricks to DigitalOcean Tutorials. They've had enough time to see how well CSS-Tricks traffic is converting into customers, and perhaps there is a strong decline for the past couple of months, but this is entirely my own speculation.

Also, in their Q4 Report [0] they are using this wording,

"Added thousands of tutorials, guides and educational content through the acquisition of CSS-Tricks and JournalDev."

Back when DO acquired Scotch.io, they only migrated the best / most popular tutorials, and I wouldn't be surprised this is the fate for CSS-Tricks also. I think there are thousands of published pages on CSS-Tricks, many of which already overlap with what DO has written over the years, and on top of that - it would involve some serious work to migrate everything.

Again, these are just my thoughts on it, but why else would they just kick Geoff off the team like that?

[0]: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20230215005423/en/Dig...

This is not the case here. The teams responsible for DigitalOcean’s tutorials were completely removed in this round of layoffs. Not only is is unlikely CSS Tricks won’t be migrated, there may never be another new tutorial again.

Does that mean their Write for DOnations program is canned?

If this is true then I really am screwed. I have an article due for publication under that program, it had already passed the tech test, just a review of the actual text was needed. Angry because my article was with them for over 60 days tch.

I sent them emails asking for updates 4days ago and yesterday, no response.

I've mostly given up now, but I still kind of hold out hope, that $300 payout would've changed this Nigerian's life...even if only for just a while

A couple of places you can get paid for FOSS tech documentation work btw:

https://developers.google.com/season-of-docs/ https://lwn.net/op/AuthorGuide.lwn

The FOSSjobs site has a category for editors/writers too, not all of them seem to be related to the category though.

https://www.fossjobs.net/jobs/editors/

Thank you, I will check them out.

Also the FOSSjobs resources page might have links to FOSS employers that have documentation jobs.

https://github.com/fossjobs/fossjobs/wiki/resources

They've had enough time to see how well CSS-Tricks traffic is converting into customers, and perhaps there is a strong decline for the past couple of months, but this is entirely my own speculation.

You might be right, but I'd hope they weren't looking at it that way. Content sites like that are a long play. I've encountered lots of people who seem to have extra trust for DigitalOcean because of their (admittedly good) content and while they might not have directly "converted" from a specific article, it has hugely helped DO's brand. A site like CSS Tricks is so valuable in the long term rather than for short term conversions.

> I've encountered lots of people who seem to have extra trust for DigitalOcean because of their (admittedly good) content and while they might not have directly "converted" from a specific article, it has hugely helped DO's brand

Umm, I am a customer of DigitalOcean, have several production workloads with them, yet until reading this article today I had no idea they had "content" of this type.

Okay, that makes one of you? I am exactly the person GP is describing — I ended up reading a lot of their tutorials and when I needed a VPS, I decided to go with DigitalOcean because I already trusted the brand.

That's fair enough, but also why any larger company should have a broad strategy for marketing and sales as there are a lot of routes that customers take. I once ended up in a multi year contract with a company because I ended up in their IRC channel and I liked it. Did they get most of their customers that way? I imagine not.

That said, DO is pretty well known in developer circles for its thousands of tutorials (less so for its ownership of CSS Tricks which is very recent) but that is certainly not universal.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com