The trash pile is on fire

I was thinking about parts of the web community/industry that we've lost in the past 5 years or so and speculating on some of the reasons why. No right answers nor thoroughly thought out, and I'll definitely miss some, but wanted to throw these thoughts into my own little space before I forget them. We haven't completely lost everything in this list, for better or worse. Some have been pretty top of mind as of late with some discussions around "AI taking our jobs" and whatnot.

Enjoy me rambling instead of making a 20 post long Bluesky thread. I'm going to go back about 5 years. Or, just before and at the start of the pandemic, more or less. Here are some things we had that are either greatly diminished or probably gone:

Twitter

I think a lot of folks found the web community via Twitter. I certainly did. Losing it (and yes, it is lost) was a pretty big blow to an intersection of communities; for myself, web and accessibility. Kudos to Jack and Elon for burning it to the ground. They got what they wanted. There is no justice, blah blah blah.

Happy to say I reconnected with folks on Mastodon and Bluesky and am pretty fulfilled as far as web community social media goes.

Junior developers

Of course we still have them. But, we had a surge of new developers, coming from other fields or unconventional education pipelines. Bootcamp and Twitch study group grads. Retail turned javascript developer. I liked that. I feel like, especially with the garbage pile Twitter is now, there is less excitement about it. Back to the "happy path" of comp sci degree straight to big-tech intern, I guess, if you want to get ahead. I hate that.

I miss the excitement of new people learning about the web. I hope it is still out there, somewhere, and maybe I just can't see it. I think the bootcamp companies also ran out of ways to take advantage of students so that industry also went quiet.

Developer advocates

Listen, we basically had developer influencers. It was out of control. Twitter was a popularity contest of these people. Sure, there is a time and place for this role to do some real work, but, in my opinion, a lot of companies did not effectively utilize them.

We still have them, definitely less trendy, and it seems like fewer and farther between. It was a pretty glamourized role at the time. Less so, now. Unless you turned into one of those YouTube personality devs (not a knock at everyone that makes developer YouTube content, but you know the type).

Remote work

Whiffs of unionization? Tax breaks from big cities to bring more workers downtown? A facade of collaboration? More people for "that one guy" to talk over in meetings? A reason for me to up my anxiety medication? Putting those tech workers back in their place? There are too many reasons why we lost this and few, if any, of them are pro-worker.

NFTs/web3

If CEOs could have found a way to explain away the pyramid-scheme-ness of NFTs, they probably would have shoved them down our throats more. I don't care what web3 is/was and if any of it remains it has gone quietly into the void where it belongs and I don't have to hear about it every day from the most annoying people. What the fuck is a developer dao.

What happened

The pandemic. Unionization efforts. Racism. Elections. Ableism. Fascism. Probably a lot more to add to the list of what caused all these changes.