It’s a little surreal watching Kevin recap the current CSS-Tricks situation.
It’s been rollercoastery after DigitalOcean’s acquisition. Thoughts:
- DigitalOcean bought the site. They can do whatever they want with it.
- At the very least, I hope it stays online. Aside from a general distaste for bitrot, a lot of people have bylines on that site, and they deserve to have those online to benefit them in perpetuity.
- DigitalOcean should be clear and honest in their communications about the site, especially with those who work on it. Geoff is a good dude who deserves that, obviously.
- What I’d prefer to see is the site thrive and be good for everyone. Eric’s idea is cool.
- It’s a difficult time in tech to try to run a niche text-based publication as a profitable business. It’s hard to shake the feeling you’re paying to train LLMs. That’s why I thought DigitalOcean was a good buyer originally: it doesn’t need to generate money directly; it can function as top-of-funnel customer acquisition via being a good community steward.
- I’m happy to talk to the powers that be if it’s helpful.
I have zero background knowledge of what’s going on. Just thought I’d share my gut.
This seems like a text-book case of Late Stage Capitalism. Companies are too busy hypergrowing their way towards climate and societal apocalypse, they don’t really care about a few starving web builders.
Digital Ocean choosing to shell out money to white supremacist billionaire DHH (it’s called ‘Super Intelligence’, guys), while refusing to pay hard working people, just makes me cringe hard.
But we know that billionaire values will never align with our own.
This whole situation sucks hard, and I feel it in my bones seeing the community being ripped apart like this.
(I got here via https://frontendnexus.com)