Tailwind CSS Lets Go 75% Of Engineers After 40% Traffic Drop From Google (seroundtable.com)
- Reference: 0180549031
- News link: https://it.slashdot.org/story/26/01/08/1756211/tailwind-css-lets-go-75-of-engineers-after-40-traffic-drop-from-google
- Source link: https://www.seroundtable.com/tailwind-css-google-drop-40725.html
Traffic to Tailwind's documentation has fallen roughly 40% since early 2023 despite the framework being more popular than ever, Wathan wrote in a post. The documentation is the primary channel through which developers discover Tailwind's commercial products, and without that traffic the business has struggled to sustain itself; revenue has dropped close to 80%.
The reduced team also means Wathan cannot currently prioritize implementing LLMS.txt, a proposed feature that would make documentation more accessible to large language models. "Tailwind is growing faster than it ever has and is bigger than it ever has been, and our revenue is down close to 80%," he wrote in the forum post.
[1] https://www.seroundtable.com/tailwind-css-google-drop-40725.html
The end of public knowledge (Score:5, Insightful)
As we move forward, there will be less and less incentive to share useful information.
Re: (Score:1)
What makes you think 99.9% of the public information on the internet is useful? I mean, look at my comment. Most of it is the same info repeated over and over a 1000's times since the beginning of the internet. LLMs just de-dupe it a bit. Google is 27 years old, GPT came out in 2022.
Re: (Score:2)
Did I say 99.0%?
I've been on the internet since the early 90s. There was useful information back then. The amount of useful info grew and grew over the following couple of decades. Over time, though, attention-seeking/ad-seeking bullshit sites grew and slowly drowned out the useful info. The internet has grown more and more resistant to new and correcting information.
CSS frameworks are fads (Score:1)
They come and go. At some point everyone is laughing at you for choosing the wrong CSS framework. At some point your favorite CSS framework has to be replaced. Granted, your framework is still fine. You will be able to do amazing things if you're still using Blueprint of 960.gs. And while I rag on Tailwind as being Font Tags 2.0, that at least let web designers create pages don't look like that framework where every site using it looks the same.
AI Slop (Score:2)
Sucking in all the creativity and giving AI Slop.
I hope this fad dies soon (Score:4, Insightful)
This is a huge non semantic pleague littering dom inline styling
Re: (Score:2)
But what drives this is trend of having the basic unit of reusability be the component, which is improved by Tailwind removing some of the other bigger sins of inline styles. There's other methods on the same front that sidestep class standardization, like Vue Component style scoping. With the end goal being an enterprise library / storybook of consistent pre-styled components to include in multiple projects with upgrades handled in the same way as other JS packages.
Without the reusable components then Tail
Re: I hope this fad dies soon (Score:2)
But that's literally why have the classes and semantic css been invented
Statistics (Score:4, Informative)
> let go of 75% of his engineering team
That sounds like a lot.
> reducing it from four people to one
That is not a lot.
Re: (Score:2)
And it also reflects that their business wasn't Tailwind CSS but the extras like the Component Library.
Really? (Score:1)
All that to say your business isn't doing very well and you had to fire three people?
1: Rename to "Headwinds" (Score:2)
2: ????
3: Profit!
Makes about as much sense as their previous marketing plan.
Google now sponsoring it... (Score:2)
1 Hour ago:
Logan Kilpatrick: "I am happy to share that we (the @GoogleAIStudio team) are now a sponsor of the @tailwindcss project! Honored to support and find ways to do more together to help the ecosystem of builders."
[1]https://bsky.app/profile/offic... [bsky.app]
[1] https://bsky.app/profile/officiallogank.bsky.social/post/3mbwpewmzt62k
Perhaps they could consider marketing (Score:2)
"The documentation is the primary channel through which developers discover Tailwind's commercial products"
Turns out there is a place for advertising your product and bringing it to peoples' attention rather than just expecting them to find you.
Then change with the times? (Score:2)
I'm not familiar with what they're offering as their commercial products, but maybe they're not useful or necessary anymore?
Or they need to advertise them actively now, instead of assuming passive traffic will "show the right people".
Or change how they're able to monetize their work. Times change, and I'd guess software licenses might need to change with them.
Why (Score:2)
Why would less traffic to your documentation affect your engineers working on the product?
Marketing Fail (Score:1)
I had a look at their website and had to scroll 2/3 down before there was any mention of a Tailwind Plus. Either a marketing failure or an unwillingness to sacrifice principles, but either way it's a failure of management more than LLM's tearing down their business. If you want to survive as a company, use your website as a vehicle to promote your paid services.
Get better marketing. (Score:1)
So the README file has ads? You can't hope that people will stumble on your commercial products when searching for documentation. They got lucky thats how it worked out, but it wasn't a good plan. My goal is to never use a search engine again. Just tell me what I need to know. Now that's greedy of me, so I'll also accept having AI take me to the webpage, but I swear if I land on a stale page or have to read your life story just to find out what I'm looking for that's it. Also no forums like ever just tell m
Re:Get better marketing. (Score:5, Informative)
You are misinformed about how LLMs work if you think that LLM-generated answers on Google are accurate or trustworthy.
Re: (Score:1)
True, but I get a wider swath of information that I can dig deeper into from the LLMs than compared to just diving into each webpage and hoping I'll find the info.
Re: (Score:2)
But the answers are often "good enough" and save me a ton of time. I have enough skepticism and critical thinking to know when an answer is suspect.
This really seems like a marketing problem rather than an AI issue.
Re:Get better marketing. (Score:4, Informative)
> This really seems like a marketing problem rather than an AI issue.
This is most definitely an LLM problem and a marketing problem combined, but it is all rooted in the LLM problem. Just where do you think the LLM gets its useful information? And how useful do you think the LLM would be without the underlying websites used to feed it?
Re: (Score:3)
That's fine. And Tailwind never gets updated again, and you have to go find another solution and other companies have to migrate off.
Tailwind generates an enormous value and cannot pay their employees to maintain that value. That's a problem. It's not like tailwind is 200 employees, either.
We need to have a better model for OSS that has product companies shouldering their fair share.
Insanity (Score:4, Insightful)
That attitude is of course insanity, the same kind of reasoning that complains about energy competition from the sun.
I'm sorry you're incapable of competing with free, you seem very frustrated about it. Many people/companies are perfectly capable of doing so, though; perhaps you should look at what they're doing.
In any case, having a large software commons [1]is very good for business [hbs.edu]. It is no different than other infrastructure - when we built the highway system in the US, it meant lots of little guys could start lots of businesses that competed with railroads. For "free"! Can you imagine how that hurt the railroads?
Competition has made compilers free, not the fact that some of them are open. Same thing happened to browsers, but I don't hear you complaining about that, despite the fact that open ones are not, in fact, terribly competitive at the moment from a marketshare perspective.
Maps used to cost money, too, as did a lot of things that are now freeish. We call this "progress", and celebrate it. Maybe try to make things people want, instead of trying to make everything else worse so they're trapped paying for things they don't.
[1] https://www.library.hbs.edu/working-knowledge/open-source-software-the-nine-trillion-resource-companies-take-for-granted