I don’t think about «your tech» at all

A recurring drama on social media takes the following, predictable form:

There are two technologies, Foo and Bar, that (at least seemingly) compete.
Someone from Foo community says something vague and negative about Bar.
Foo community likes and re-shares.
Bar community replies, mocks, refutes and otherwise spends time and attention on this.

This is a mistake.

The correct response to someone “dunking” on your favorite tech stack is to ignore them. I realize it’s very unsatisfying, but being ignored is a much worse outcome for the initiators of drama than any kind of response.

I've seen this many times:

“SQL is dead” (said by nosql folks)
“the app as we know it is dead” (said by PWA folks)
“PWA is dead” (said by the app folks)
“Ruby on Rails is dead”
“Dart is dead”
“Flutter is dead”
etc.

Why do people do this? Don’t they have better things to do than to dunk on other people’s software tools?

Well, I can tell you from experience that these kinds of messages have the best chance of going viral. “Us versus them” content performs fantastic on social media. Since these posts are often also vague and open-ended, they invite more people to opinionate, driving the algorithm’s coveted “engagement” metrics even higher.

Aside: In political science, this mechanism is believed to be a leading source of affective polarization — which, in turn, is a big reason for things going to shit around the world. (Stanford paper PDF)

You’ll often have people who post useful, technical stuff on the internet, and get moderate reach. And then one day they decide to vent a little, and say something negative about a “them” technology, and suddenly they’re drowning in likes and subscribes. That’s when you notice them.

Some of them, to their infinite credit, just move along and go back to their technical content. But others increasingly shift to doing “us vs them” stuff — for the ego and the fun of it.

I've been involved in quite a few tech communities so far, and I can tell you this — nobody wins when you start dunking on a “competing” tech. Lots of people lose a bunch of time and nerves on it. The “them” community needs to deal with the bad press (“no, we’re not dying”). The “us” community looks bully-ish and insecure.

Please, if you share a community with me (perhaps you’re a fellow Flutter developer, or a game developer), do me a favor and avoid publicly dunking on other’s technologies. I really don’t care about problems that some other tech stack might have according to someone who isn’t using it. I don’t care if you think some other technology “is dead” based on your reading of a Twitter timeline or whatever.

Breathe in. Breathe out. Don’t get tangled in the engagement-hunting drama and instead work on stuff that matters.

— Filip Hráček
November 2025