This is me venting

[Dani]

This is definitely not a targeted attack at anyone. Please take it just as me having a bad day and venting.

I'm kinda tired of people constantly telling me that I'm the reason that DaniWeb traffic has tanked over the years. And if only I had done this differently. Or done that differently. Or listened to members more about this. Or listened to members more about that.

I have always done what I thought was in the best interests of DaniWeb long term. There have been many times over the past twenty years that I've looked back, and hindsight is always 20/20, and thought that maybe if I hadn't done this than that wouldn't have happened, or I did this wrong, or I screwed up here, or I screwed up there, or I did that right after all.

But the thing is, at the end of the day, I'm the only one willing to put my money where my mouth is.

In the current landscape of tech and programming forums, Dream.in.Code went out of business. DevShed went out of business. Cre8asite Forums went out of business. Bytes.com is hanging on by a loose thread.

Yes, we aren't nearly as popular as we were in the 2010s. Heck, we aren't even profitable anymore. But I'm paying for all server costs out of pocket. I'm working on the site every day (that I am able to, given recent health challenges). I've made, on average, 700-1000 code check-ins annually for the past ten years. Of course I'm doing what I think is in DaniWeb's best interests. Always.

There are just some days, like today, where I'm feeling a bit more dejected than normal, and just wanting a pat on the back from time to time.

[Reverend Jim]

It's hard for me to imagine that all of the pleasure I've gotten out of Daniweb, the challenges, the insights, the friendships since I joined in 2010, are all dependent on the largesse of just one very talented person. I, for one, appreciate all you have done, particularly considering your current health issues. If you feel unappreciated then perhaps this post will make you feel a little less so.

[Reverend Jim]

Also, in non-computing over the years I have heard comments like "if only I hadn't stopped for coffee I would have missed that accident, or several other variations. The thing is you never know what would have happened if you had made different decisions. Certainly making a different decision may have resulted in things being better. Or they might have been worse, or exactly the same. There's no need to beat yourself up wondering what if.

[jkon]

Dani , yes I also believe that you are responsible for the decline of DaniWeb .... BUUUT that was many years ago. We all foreseen the decline of "forums" back in early 2010's , there were many alternatives of what to do , and I strongly believe that you choose the wrong one. I will not repeat what you did or what you could be done differently , I have told that many times , forums as we knew were dead - we all seen that , what was missing was a programming hub of news / forum / interviews .

But here we are ... and forums could have a revive in certain areas. Not in SEO advertisement topics , but invest your time that when someone asks a serious question gets an answer. I have got the answer "because this is what is being told" several times over the last months when I ask for something that Gemini or ChatGPT would give me the default answer and not more reasoning (example my C++ threads). Even if you don't know C++ , learn or ask someone that knows to look at the issue and respond with a concrete answer. Programming is not always true or false , it is what you want to do , how do you want to do it , what are the other factors / people involved , and what resources are you willing to spend to it ... that is something that AI will not understand for MANY MANY years to come.

Forums could have a revive if are useful and have a sufficient user base. DaniWeb as it is now has the second one. And in my view it is not late to transform it to a programmers hub .

[Dani]

what was missing was a programming hub of news / forum / interviews

I have always been a strong proponent of having editorial (news, tutorials, interviews, etc.) complement the user-generated forum discussions. In the past, well over 50% of our gross revenue from advertising went straight into paying for staff writers. IMHO we used to have a lot of tech news content being published regularly, but as traffic declined, so did revenue, and so did the budget for staff writers. The nail in the coffin was when I was no longer able to afford Davey (happygeek), because his gig at Forbes turned into a fulltime promotion and there was just no way I was able to compete with what they were paying him. I feel like a lot of members left when happygeek left. For sure, our Google rankings tanked a lot due to no longer having regular news stories and editorial daily.

However, I'm still keeping up with some staff writers. For example, Johannes just published an interview last week, and Usman just published a tutorial a couple of days ago. Of course, we don't have the level of clout that we used to in order to attract interviewees like Steve Wozniak anymore, but we're trying.

[alan.davies]

Just checked-in out of interest after a long time away. Glad to see a lot of old friends still active here. Then I came across this post. It upset me a bit. Daniweb was the sun in my very dark days. I think a lot of us gained so much from DW, but you don't always get the attagirls you deserve. I think stackoverflow pretty much killed off most of the old coding forum sites. Not your doing. I think it's a miracle that you've kept DW going. Sorry miracle sounds like it's a fluke. It's not. It's your hard work and dedication that keeps DW going. Best wishes Dani with all your challenges, Alan (diafol)

[Dani]

Thank you so much, diafol.

Feel free to stay a bit and help out ;)

[Naor]

I don't remember how I found daniweb. I think it was a year ago clicking on search result on google. The website actually caught my eyes immediately. I really liked the design and the interactivity. I also was welcomed by a site admin named dani. I didn't know she is the brain behind it. Man, This is amazing website. Thinking that 1 person is behind this massive hub is impressive! I can't even imagine the challenges! Also the fact that this hub has operated since the 2000 makes it more impressive. I think you need to be a super talented and smart person to operate in this space. daniweb is definitely one of my favorite community websites.

[jkon]

I can't start a new topic for this because:
daniweb.com/community/contribute
responds with 500 Internal Server Error , thought to write to you about that in case you haven't noticed yet. It is like the outer "template" is missing and you are serving an incomplete "inner" template distributed from an exception

[Dani]

So sorry. I tried to improve something yesterday that accidentally introduced a fatal error (as you've pointed out). I've now squashed it. Unfortunately, I've been incredibly exhausted lately and having a very difficult time concentrating. I'll try to do better.

[Brian Wozeniak]

Dani, just wanted to let you know Ozzu has been in the same boat as you since around 2010. I actually discovered your website when at one point you had the budget to advertise on our website (as I imagine you were advertising across many channels/websites). Our sites are similar in the aspect that we have both generally been forums (you're more IT focused than we are), and as already discussed here forums have pretty much died (unfortunately). Here are some of the reasons I think that occurred:

1. Social Media - Easier to connect with people you know (FB, Reddit, etc)
2. Stackoverflow - Killed much of its competition
3. AI - Potentially killing stackoverflow, and is just much easier / quicker versus going through forums/QA websites

At least for Ozzu, from around 2001 - 2010, there was a huge community aspect of our website. People engaged frequently just because they met and then knew each other and it was a way to collaborate, make friends, besides communicating all around a central topic (web development in our case). Once social media really took off (particularly FB), I think many realized that the sort of need for engaging with people was better there. If they had 20 minutes to spend, they would rather put the time there than engaging with people they met on our forums; thus, there was no longer a need to get that from forums (such as Ozzu, and perhaps your site Daniweb).

Then the next big thing that I believe hurt forums, and in our case Ozzu, was stackoverflow. The idea of promoting the best answers to the top was huge, and I will admit that at least for our website, we did not react quick enough for that and many years went by before we even had such a feature. Stack Overflow (SO) dominated the SERPs and took most of the traffic with them, leaving scraps for the rest of us (from IT to web development and all sorts of topics via Stack Exchange like home improvement, they literally went after all traffic that used to go to forums).

Finally for the last couple of years, yet another thing going against forums, and in my opinion SO too, is AI. The progression of AI has been quick, and its only going to accelerate. The web developer team I control (outside of Ozzu, yeah I have a second job these days as Ozzu can no longer support me full time), many of us will skip forums and stack overflow and go right to OpenAI. Sure it gets things wrong from time to time, but in general it can at least give you a good starting point to tackle problems / challenges, or even provide you the answer or a close answer to move you to the next step. Who wants to go through a forum to wait for a response that may never happen (since seems like nobody posts much these days).

With all of this said I have made the same observations as you with Ozzu, all sorts of people signup and nobody posts. Majority of the people signing up are from India, and most of the posts that do occur are spam. Many are just dormant accounts. Yeah we get a few legitimate ones here and there, but it was nothing like before 2010. It took me many years to accept the way things are looking, but as of the last few years I have finally accepted the new reality and just need to keep open minded enough to move forward in other ways. Without going into details with Ozzu's plans, this means finding ways to offer things to people that might be different than what they can get via OpenAI (or even stack overflow).

Anyway I just wanted to let you know that you aren't alone in this frustration. It was and has been a depressing experience watching the downfall of once was for our website. For 15 years I was able to work only for Ozzu full time, we were able to get enough revenue from that to support everything. These days not so much, and its actually losing money currently.

From 2010 to 2022 our traffic graph was constantly moving down when looking from left to right. That finally changed for us and at our low in 2022 we have since had an increase of 200-300% in our organic traffic (but still a long, long ways from what we once were). However, getting people to post is still just as frustrating, but I have a little bit of hope to at least seen our traffic trends reverse. Took over a decade to finally stop the bleeding.

Anyway I hope that offers you a bit encouragement, or at least to let you know that you haven't been alone with the struggle.

[Dani]

Thank you for sharing your story, Brian. Indeed, Google has been killing off forums for the past decade. They're now seeing the benefit of forums, and ironically need to pay Reddit for access because it's the only forum left standing. Maybe if they hadn't killed us all off, they wouldn't need to rely so heavily on Reddit? ;) Just random food for thought on this Friday afternoon.

Anyways, I am glad that you had a huge surge over the past couple of years. DaniWeb, unfortunately, hasn't been as lucky, but as you may have read here, I've been very sick the past few years and so really haven't been able to focus much on it.