Nobody reads tutorials. I'm not saying that as a feeling. I'm saying it as a man looking at a column of zeros he produced himself, one hopeful post at a time.
This account has 40-odd published posts on dev.to. I'm a student who codes and runs a tiny digital-products store on the side, so the numbers were never going to be large. Fine. Small numbers I can live with. What I can't stop staring at is how neatly the zeros line up by shape.
The table of shame ðŠĶ
| Post | Reactions | Comments |
|---|---|---|
| A realistic Python plan, one hour a day | 0 | 0 |
| The free resources that replace the paid Python shelf | 0 | 0 |
| How long it actually takes to learn Python | 0 | 0 |
| My VS Code settings, explained | 0 | 0 |
| Commit messages as a changelog, an experiment | 0 | 0 |
Every one of those posts is fine. That is the insult. They're organised, they're accurate, a couple of them took real evenings to put together. And a reader can get the same content out of any chatbot in about 40 seconds, formatted nicer. Readers know this. They behave accordingly.
Now the other side of the ledger
Some weeks ago I ran an experiment where I hid an instruction inside a log file and handed it to an AI agent with the power to run commands. It obeyed the log, three times out of three, and reported success using the log's own wording. That post has 14 comments on it, including a technical argument about where an agent's permission check should live that ran for days. A commenter picked at the weakest seam in the setup, the part I already suspected, and the sequel test I'm running exists because of his objection. It is basically his comment with code attached.
A post where I tallied 30 beginner job ads by hand, word by word, picked up 4 thoughtful comments within a day. One reader asked whether the ads that wanted depth in one stack were the same ads that asked for a finished project. I hadn't cross-tabbed that pair. He found a hole in my homework by reading it more carefully than some of my classmates read anything.
My post-mortem on 30 days of writing in public has 6 comments. One reader used them to correct a claim of mine, in public, with arithmetic, and the thread is better than the section of the article he was correcting.
And the pricing confession, where I admitted my first product sat at $3.99 for a month and nearly a third of its buyers were confused about what they'd purchased, got a long, detailed reply from a reader running the same experiment on his own product. He wanted to know whether the confused emails stopped after I rewrote the page, and whether a $9.99 test was coming. Nobody asks a tutorial a follow-up question. There's nothing to follow up. The answer was in the post, so the conversation is over before it starts.
The pattern, as far as I can see it
Every dead post on that list told people what to do. Every live one showed them something that had happened and left a loose end sticking out of it: a real number, a mistake with my name on it, a question I genuinely hadn't answered. Instructions close a conversation. Evidence opens one.
The other half of the change is less noble. These threads only started after I began replying to every comment like a person, short and specific and willing to write "fair point, I was wrong" when I was wrong, and after I started spending time in other writers' comment sections saying things worth replying to. The author of a rival log-hijacking experiment, whose post I'd commented on, later turned up in the comments of mine. That traffic has a direction, and it isn't from the post button.
The honest catch
My account is tiny, and you should read every number above in that light. 14 comments is a good week here, not a phenomenon. This is one account, one corner of one platform, a few weeks of evidence, and I am the entire sample. Treat it as a pattern, not a law.
But the zeros, though. Five tutorial-shaped posts. Five identical outcomes, zero and zero. At some point a coincidence grows up and becomes a policy, and mine is now: if a post doesn't contain a thing that actually happened, a number I actually measured, or a mistake I actually made, it doesn't go up.
Your turn. What was your best-performing post, and what was your worst, and is the gap between them as embarrassing as mine? Show me your table of shame. I showed you mine. ðŠĶ
P.S. Everything I write stays free â that part doesn't change. But if this one was worth something to you, you can buy me a coffee â (one-time or monthly, both work). It covers the API credits and hosting behind these experiments â and honestly, it's also the nudge that gets the next one started on the evenings I'd otherwise skip it. â Salam
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