86% of dev.to articles get zero comments. I spent a week thinking mine were the problem
Update, 2026-09-21 — the premise of this article expired two days after I measured it, and the expiry is the best evidence in it When I measured all this, my seven articles here had zero comments between them . That is no longer true. My eighth article, published 2026-09-20, has twelve comments: five from two strangers, and seven of them my own replies. Reactions across everything I have…
A recent study found that 86% of articles on the dev.to platform receive no comments at all, which is the same outcome for the author of this report. After initially believing that their seven articles were the problem, the author measured the actual performance of typical articles on the same tags and found that 86.4% of them also have zero comments.
This revelation led to correcting a title and refuting their initial conclusion, highlighting the importance of comparing a measurement to a base rate rather than relying on an unexamined expectation. The author emphasizes that a single zero comment does not indicate anything about the quality of the writing, and that the measurement cost only a few minutes of API calls.
While the study does not prove that dev.to is an ineffective platform for the author, it does show that the presence of comments and reactions does not necessarily indicate successful engagement.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
