Ask HN: Where do all the web devs talk? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Where do all the web devs talk?

56 pointsLinguaBrowse52 comments

I've been using Twitter / X for a good decade now, and while I've found it's a great place to connect with native app dev communities (I'm well connected with the React Native scene), I really struggle to connect with any web devs.

There are a few big names like Adam Wathan who are pretty active on Twitter of course, but considering how widespread web dev is, I see precious few up-and-coming web devs coding in public.

So, where are they? I have explored BlueSky a bit, but again it feels a bit like tumbleweeds (though maybe that's just my luck as a small account).

Are web devs more old-school, posting on bulletin boards and forums? Or is X still the answer, and I'm just getting aggressively packed into a different bubble?

… Or is it all realtime communication, like Slack and Discord, these days?

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I am kind of surprised no-one has mentioned the obvious: Hacker News. Unless I've misunderstood your question, the bulk of web dev discussion happens in technical posts on personal and business blogs, which are then aggregated right here. It's a big part of why I'm on here.

If you're talking more about chat, the more messy "pair programming" side of web dev, I have always found this happens in actual dev teams who are working on the same product or for the same business. You do absolutely get chat like this at conventions - I have been to DjangoCon and PyCon back in the day and there were enormously useful discussions at those - but devs need to have something in common to talk about. As someone else has said here already, web dev is a far far broader topic than you might think - I have often found speaking to other devs I did not understand what it was they were doing. Alberta Tech did one on this: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DBSpm2CNuGF/?igsh=NGttZzk5NzB...

The thing about Hacker News is that it's a real fight for life to get any engagement. Just showing the humble project you're working on doesn't cut it. You need to time your submission just right and impress like you're doing a product launch, otherwise you get no visibility and no comments. Social media shouldn't have to be so exhausting and competitive.

HN is hostile to most web dev. About 10% of web dev is acceptable, and the rest is bad for one reason or another.

I don't feel the need to have daily contact or discussions with other web devs over technical matters. Standards should move slowly and thoughtfully so such discussions are more suited to blogs and daily chats are only water cooler talk and socialization. It's just not as valuable unless you're trying to understand a concept but, hopefully, that's not a need on a daily basis.

There used to be many excellent web development communities, but almost all of them have died more than 10 years ago. You can still find some good on topic conversation on IRC.

These communities died because experienced developers wanted to talk about product and emerging capabilities. People entering web development just wanted to just talk about frameworks and trends. The experienced people stopped contributing once everything becomes about tool literacy and conversations about framework literacy are boring to everyone so even the conversation killers would stop showing up once it’s apparent the scene is killed.

Interesting. That's exactly what I feel about most subreddits. Go to r/Python for example.

It's an endless stream of basic tool/library questions. Put me off reddit quite a bit.

Exactly. Many senior devs don’t want talk about the latest updates but those topics are usually what’s trending on X/YouTube/or even HN.

Let’s face it, how many times does those new features really “revolutionise” or make a real dent in our work? Or are the content creators just using them as click baits to get views and engagements which eventually can turn into monetary or network values for them?

Real talks are getting hard to find in this attention economy plus bots rampage across the internet.

There is a very large presence over at Mastodon when it comes to people well versed in web standards. The public discussions are often very lively (in a good way).

yeah check out https://front-end.social - some popular front end dev accounts:

https://mastodon.social/@firefoxwebdevs

https://social.lol/@db

https://front-end.social/@piccalilli

https://mastodon.social/@davatron5000

https://indieweb.social/@addyosmani

https://front-end.social/@jensimmons

https://mastodon.social/@adactio

https://zachleat.com/@zachleat

https://front-end.social/@rem

https://front-end.social/@chriscoyier

https://front-end.social/@AmeliaBR

https://front-end.social/@rachelandrew

https://webtoo.ls/@astro

https://webtoo.ls/@antfu

https://front-end.social/@bramus

https://front-end.social/@5t3ph

They're closed for sign-ups, so no way to view their feed :(

But happy to follow those accounts.

Can you link to some lists or an example discussion to seed my list to follow? Mastodon seems stalled out but I think it’s just a discoverability issue.

Any tips on how to find those people or discussions?

You don’t see them because social media algorithms works for to improve your doom scrolling time. You’re not allowed to decide who to follow anymore. You have to see that they decide for you. Those people who you want to follow are only valuable for you, not for social media platforms.

This still isn’t true for Twitter like platforms like the ones OP mentioned, you see only posts from people you follow, in chronological order. If it’s not on by default, you can very easily turn it on from the main screen, and from my experience it never reverts.

I had the opposite experience with X: it would frequently reset my view to "for you". I ended up writing a tampermonkey script to work around it until I gave up on X altogether-and I do the same for platforms like YouTube. Bluesky, on the other hand, hasn't repeated this problem at all.

Recently started using NewPipe for youtube (since the content error for ubo) and its fantastic, highly recommend. No account needed but can manage subs and playlists better. Puts youtubes anti patterns to shame.

I definitely feel this. We're a far cry from the early days of Facebook where you could just post your thoughts and feelings and real people you'd know and care about would come and interact with you. Now all I see is posts from grifters and politics bots, and it's desperately hard to get my own stuff seen, even as an established account.

I want a new platform.

One of underlying issues is also, that "web dev" is a very broad field. There are people programming Ruby on Rails, C#/ASP.NET MVC, Python, Java etc. without JavaScript at all, and it is considered web dev. There are people doing FE/BE separated in whatever backend language, and using Angular/Vue/Svelte/React with TypeScript, Javascript and so on. It is a very heterogenous field. So you should narrow down what you are looking for.

I think that X was the big web dev community, and as soon as it was taken over by rocket man, people scattered to the wind. I think most, however, didn't actually go anywhere and just decided to be less social.

I've found that layoffs and RTO have multiplied the toxicity of development communities. People will openly threaten to call your HR department if you say something wrong. Developers and engineers aren't trying to get better, they're just harming each other in a loop until the most evil one survives. It's cut-throat but not even in a good way, just extremely anti-social and aggressive.

I don't recommend any development communities. If you want to try Discord, many people who will try to get you fired are available to chat with. I talk with long time friends who are developers but it's mainly really sad conversations.

How easy is it to call the HR department in the US? Here in Germany, you will almost never be put through to direct departments - especially HR. Because they are bombarded with calls from headhunters or agencies trying to sell them their services.

This. Exceptions: Hacker News and... Irc servers. Python devs are very kind for example on irc

My experience with IRC has always been the same, including present day libera.

Almost all the channels are dominated by a few terminally-online people with zero emotional intelligence and the biggest god complexes you've ever seen. Everything is black-and-white, and daring to suggest otherwise just gets you attacked.

Some will say "just use /ignore", but that's not very helpful when most conversations always involve said problematic people and their walls of text... you just constantly see one-sided conversations now.

Twitter, still.

Despite several attempts to move off, the center of gravity is still there.

Everywhere... I have seen good devs on Reddit, Discord, Mastodon and even IRC.

I browse my LinkedIn feed (yeah, I know) and I often see discussions pop up between people from my network, albeit nowadays it's mostly about AI tools.

I see discussions pop up on /r/webdev on reddit, but not a super active subreddit.

on 4chan there used to be /wdg/ (maybe there still is, but i haven't been to that website in years at this point)

I bet a lot of discussions happen on Slack servers for specific frameworks, but I don't have a lot of experience with using those except asking questions in the #questions channels

I'm only a casual dev but I see a lot of chat on Reddit, or Lemmy, the fediverse alternative. There's tech folk also using Matrix.

I just check HN for worthy news, everything else is just noise. I miss the old days of forums.

Web dev is quite a big subject. I suppose you have to focus on a certain framework or technology.

Probably narrow down on: - Laravel - Rails - Django - React - VueJS - Javascript - Typescript - PHP - Ruby - Tailwind - CSS - MySQL - PostgreSQL etc...

I think Discord/IRC are the best two options for real-time talk. Social media sites are quite clunky for that purpose, but still useful to discuss the topic.

what I do is: I join discord servers managed by tech/developer youtube content creators. on there you'll find many kinds of people, including experienced developers on basically any topic. and if you don't find anyone interesting, you can just look for and join a different server.

WebXR has a good WebXR Discord

https://discord.gg/ webxr

> Are web devs more old-school, posting on bulletin boards and forums? Or is X still the answer, and I'm just getting aggressively packed into a different bubble?

> … Or is it all realtime communication, like Slack and Discord, these days?

Yes to all.

Friends + threads like these!

Try searching Twitter using key terms on xcancel (or another proxy) in order to find more relevant accounts to follow, and seed your algorithm with.

Unless you originally started using the account for niche tech purposes, your niche interests can remain a minor part of your bubble for sure.

It’s not really the golden age of web dev. Everything has its season.

Discord channels. Though you have to find them out on your own.

“In the comment section.” Ba-dum-dum

Downvote all you want, but 4chan's /g/ is pretty honest about many subjects, including regular "webshit" discussions, while at the same time being pretty interesting and useful. Elsewhere it's too polite and even shallow.

web is a visual medium: must be tiktok

Mastodon

For high quality, low-noise discourse check out niche places, especially the friendly ones like: https://elixirforum.com

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