This trend doesn't mean that these opinion pieces are no longer being written--it only means that they are no longer being submitted to peer-reviewed journals.

This trend doesn't mean that these opinion pieces are no longer being written--it only means that they are no longer being submitted to peer-reviewed journals. Instead, people are putting them on blogs and personal websites: for examples, see [here](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/ http://www.joelonsoftware.com/), [here](https://www.schneier.com/ https://www.schneier.com/), and [here](http://norvig.com/ http://norvig.com/). In recent decades, blogs and personal websites have been extremely influential on computer science, especially within industry. I don't have enough data to make a claim about what has caused this trend, but I do think it's a positive thing for the field. Opinion pieces don't really belong in academia. We need sources of objective information, and academic, peer-reviewed research is quite intentionally designed to fulfill that role. On the other side, opinion pieces don't benefit much from academia: peer review of opinions is usually just as subjective as the opinion being reviewed, and the nature of blogs and personal websites is such that they actually disemminate their ideas to a broader audience (many academic papers are behind paywalls). TL;DR: Academia doesn't need opinion pieces, and opinion pieces don't need academia. Both serve important roles in the field of computer science, but they don't need to mix.