Enshittification: Why I’m leaving dev.to

With thanks to The Oatmeal for the cover art.

See also: enshittification.

Please consider reading this post on autonomousapps.com instead.

This will be my last post on the site dev.to. I’ve been posting my blog to that site since April 2018. My very first post was written when I was the Android team lead at Chess.com, titled Rewriting Chess.com’s Android app. Over the years, I’ve been more or less active, and have published 42 posts in all (counting this one).¹

I’ve had concerns about the long-term viability of my presence on that site for a few years, as I’ve observed layers and layers of cruft accumulate around my actual content. I always had higher priorities though, and justified the cruft by recognizing that the site is providing a free service, and it frankly makes posting a tech blog to the internet fairly easy.

The last straw came when, after my most recent post, two separate people contacted me about their experience trying to read it (one of them twice). First I was told that there’s a kind of soft login wall when visiting the post. I wasn’t aware of this because, as a writer on the site, I’m always logged in. The wall opens when interacting with one of those annoying popups so common on the Web these days:

Note there’s only one option. Clicking it leads to this:

Which fortunately can be dismissed. This is a dark pattern.

Then later, someone sent me a screenshot of what it looks like after the login cruft has been brushed away:

I’ve helpfully highlighted the portions of this screencap that are actual content. 21% of the screen real estate! And more than half the remaining is an ad for some bullshit “AI” product.

Let me state this very clearly: fuck “AI.” It’s pure marking speak for a set of technologies founded upon harm, whose primary use-cases are harm. I want nothing to do with it.

1. 
   

   An auspicious number. ↩