React Sees a dip in NPM downloads this week

thunderbong · on Sept 20, 2023

From this reddit thread [0] -

> Most likely better bot protection, almost all of npm is currently scrapped to teach ai bots coding

[0]: https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/16mna5z/whats_...

srbhr · on Sept 21, 2023

Yes might be that they're trying something like this.

Fishman343 · on Sept 20, 2023

Everything seems to be 'dipping' including bootstrap and others. Seems like an npm glitch?

franky47 · on Sept 21, 2023

The API for downloads stats across the whole registry show zero for a few days:

https://api.npmjs.org/downloads/range/2023-09-10:2023-09-21/

I wrote to NPM support on 2023-09-15 when it got temporarily fixed over the weekend, then crashed again earlier this week. Their response:

> Yes, we also see the zero download count on different packages. This issue remains under investigation. We will let you know once we have an update.

Not much of an answer..

aslilac · on Sept 20, 2023

homie, this is just what these graphs look like in general. chill.

go click on any package with substantial downloads. svelte is the same way, the downtick is just less visible because of a weirdly massive spike in their downloads.

srbhr · on Sept 20, 2023

Okay another update: https://www.npmjs.com/package/express

Express is also down. Can anyone explain what's going on? Are people really moving to Astro, Bun, Svelte? Or NPM is behaving weirdly?

bdcravens · on Sept 20, 2023

Astro shows the same decline. Likely an NPM reporting bug, some big infrastructure caching, or similar.

srbhr · on Sept 20, 2023

Okay. Thanks

MentallyRetired · on Sept 20, 2023

Hooky is also down. It may just be a bug in npm's reporting or a system down somewhere.

srbhr · on Sept 20, 2023

Okay thanks for letting me know. I had assumed that now people are trying newer alternatives. What's your take on trying something to and using them in production?

drpossum · on Sept 20, 2023

Well, that confirms it, javascript and front end development is dead. I'll start looking for a new job.

NikxDa · on Sept 20, 2023

I noticed the same for Nest.js yesterday. I think NPM might have changed the way the calculate their stats (maybe excluding automated installs or similar)? Or it might just be a glitch. I'm sure somebody will know details and clarify.

Freedom2 · on Sept 20, 2023

I think that more and more people are moving towards the good old days of PHP and server-rendered HTML. The smartest devs, believe me, have already started or finished their migration across, and the benefits are immeasurable.

latchkey · on Sept 20, 2023

Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37535142

pan69 · on Sept 20, 2023

Most of these "downloads" aren't actual downloads anyway, they just build pipelines doing `npm install`.

srbhr · on Sept 20, 2023

Popular frontend framework react sees a dip in NPM downloads. And I just saw someone asking if Svelte is a good scalable frontend framework option.

I think, people are moving towards newer frameworks more and more. Also, we had Bun 1.0 release coming up. I don't know what is going on. Any thoughts?