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The reason it didn’t last is because of blog-driven development. How does Udemy make money if everyone is using Rails with CoffeeScript and JQuery? How does Med

The reason it didn’t last is because of blog-driven development. How does Udemy make money if everyone is using Rails with CoffeeScript and JQuery? How does Medium drive new articles and new authors? They can’t. So new authors have to drive new trends, which their audience grabs onto and forces into the mainstream. Recently I had a discussion on here about React vs PHP. The conclusion seemed to be that PHP died for no reason and on second thought it’s more popular now than it’s ever been. That might be a mainstream opinion today but five years ago? How dare you speak against the React/Node hegemony. Hopefully people come around to the idea that newer is not always better and older tech is sometimes only considered outdated because the trendy blogs don’t talk about those languages/frameworks anymore. JavaScript everywhere isn’t the answer and server side languages/frameworks are often better. Phoenix LiveView might not win but it’s certainly going to define what the web looks like over the next few years.

cercatrova 6y ago
Do you really believe there's some conspiracy between Udemy, Medium and the like to drive JS development such that they could get more engagement? It seems that's a reversal of cause and effect, people like to make new stuff which Udemy and Medium were then able to capitalize on, nothing more.
- ptcampbell 6y ago
  I believe the author is theorising a phenomenon not a conspiracy.
- freehunter 6y ago
  As ptcampbell stated, I do not believe there is any collusion. It's just natural... people will get tired of reading about the same thing and stop visiting your site. So you hype up something else and see a ton of new visitors. After a while people get tired of reading about that so you come up with something new to write about which drives more hits. Eventually a pattern becomes clear, you either need to constantly write about new things or your site will be forgotten. The changes are not being driven by any need for a new language or framework, just the hype cycle of technology. And when your business depends on that hype cycle, it is in your best interest to keep that spinning as fast as possible. No collusion or conspiracy needed.

cercatrova 6y ago

Do you really believe there's some conspiracy between Udemy, Medium and the like to drive JS development such that they could get more engagement? It seems that's a reversal of cause and effect, people like to make new stuff which Udemy and Medium were then able to capitalize on, nothing more.

ptcampbell 6y ago
I believe the author is theorising a phenomenon not a conspiracy.
freehunter 6y ago
As ptcampbell stated, I do not believe there is any collusion. It's just natural... people will get tired of reading about the same thing and stop visiting your site. So you hype up something else and see a ton of new visitors. After a while people get tired of reading about that so you come up with something new to write about which drives more hits. Eventually a pattern becomes clear, you either need to constantly write about new things or your site will be forgotten. The changes are not being driven by any need for a new language or framework, just the hype cycle of technology. And when your business depends on that hype cycle, it is in your best interest to keep that spinning as fast as possible. No collusion or conspiracy needed.