Thread by @Rich_Harris

Happy to oblige! The biggest reason that a few frameworks dominate the landscape is probably straightforward inertia. Most devs (those of use who chat about this stuff on Twitter are NOT representative) don't want to investigate and learn alternatives; they have better things 1/

https://twitter.com/ramonvictor/status/1019339639151263744

to do, and engineering PMs aren't picking the 'best' technology, they're picking the safe one that means they'll be able to hire some poor sap to maintain everything a couple of years down the line. Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM. These dynamics favour incumbents. 2/

So does the cacophony of options. Why do tech meetups always serve pepperoni pizza, even though almost no-one would actually *choose* it given alternatives? Because it's something that very few people will object to. It gets the job done — it's 'good enough'. 3/

Of course, we need to talk about 'good enough'. When people say that about their framework, they invariably mean 'good enough for the current users of the app I'm currently building' (to which you can often add 'served locally on this beefy iMac'), which is sometimes true! 4/

When @slightlylate comes along with a trace and says 'actually it's not good enough!', fw communities tend to respond with tone policing (often via subtweet) instead of engaging with the substance, because we're all tribal to some extent, which makes it an emotional attack. 5/

How do we pick tribes in the first place? I'll give you a clue — it's not by conducting a rigorous technical analysis of all the available options. Most devs just don't engage critically on that level at all. Instead, we go by deeply flawed proxies like GitHub stars. 6/

The hype that generates those stars is often genuinely driven by quality. (React and Vue really are great!) Often, it's driven by 'thoughtleaders', because we've managed to create a cult of celebrity in an industry that really doesn't need it. 7/

If something is successful enough, it will attract people selling workshops and books and egghead courses, which creates financial interests to promote particular technologies — coal for the hype train's engine room. 8/

So to me, the more interesting question is 'how can the community make more informed technology decisions?' And I'm biased, given what I do for a living, but I think it's obvious what our community lacks: journalism. 9/

Other professional disciplines have trade publications that employ (i.e. pay!) people to provide informed coverage of issues that matter to their readers. Ours doesn't — instead we have cheaply produced stuff like JavaScript Weekly, which is full of other people's #content. 10/

What is that #content? It's posts from people like me, promoting our own work. It's acres of badly researched Medium blogs. Sometimes it's well-written expert stuff, but generally from a particular POV. None of it meets the editorial standards of any reputable publication. 11/

The interesting thing is that the economics of front end development journalism would probably work — there's a ton of money sloshing around in the space, and plenty of fascinating stuff to cover. Someone just needs to make it happen. 12/12