CSS-Tricks Goes Quiet Again, Two Years After DigitalOcean's Promise

CSS-Tricks has gone quiet for a second time under DigitalOcean's ownership, according to a Sept. 15 post by developer Declan Chidlow, four years after the cloud-computing company paid $4 million for the site and more than two years after its chief executive publicly promised to fix an earlier version of the same problem.

Chidlow's post, titled "CSS-Tricks in Limbo", says editor Geoff Graham has spent months trying to raise the site's situation internally with no response from DigitalOcean leadership, and that the company has "largely just gone silent" on the subject a second time. Chidlow calls CSS-Tricks "one of very few quality publications about the web" and argues that losing it a second time would cost the field a reference site that took more than a decade to build, not just a company blog.

The pattern repeating from 2023

DigitalOcean acquired CSS-Tricks for $4 million in March 2022, according to founder Chris Coyier's own account of the sale. Coyier writes that he expected the company to invest in content and community, remove ads, keep Graham on as editor, and let him focus his own time on CodePen instead. About a year later, DigitalOcean laid off Graham and the rest of the site's content team as part of a wider round of cuts, and the last new article ran April 12, 2023, according to a contemporaneous account of the shutdown. Coyier's own description of that period is blunt: DigitalOcean, he wrote, "followed suit and slurped up the profits" rather than continuing to invest in the site once traffic and ad revenue no longer needed a content team to sustain them.

What DigitalOcean promised in 2024

Coyier published a public appeal on Feb. 28, 2024, arguing that DigitalOcean should hand the site back rather than let it sit unmaintained, since he believed he could rebuild its readership and that doing so would cost the company less than continuing to hold a site it was not using. Within days, Chief Executive Paddy Srinivasan responded publicly that he and Coyier had "a very constructive conversation on the current and future state of CSS-Tricks" and that DigitalOcean "haven't lived up to our responsibility as the stewards of the site," according to a report on the exchange published March 5, 2024. Graham returned to lead the site in June 2024, and CSS-Tricks began publishing again with an updated design, Chidlow's post says.

Milestone	Date
DigitalOcean acquires CSS-Tricks for $4 million	March 2022
Graham and content team laid off; last article runs	April 12, 2023
Srinivasan publicly pledges to fix it	early March 2024
Graham returns, site resumes publishing	June 2024
Chidlow reports the site dormant again	Sept. 15, 2026

What has changed since

According to Chidlow, DigitalOcean has since pledged $3 million to Omarchy, a Linux distribution led by Ruby on Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson, while ceasing its $50-a-month contributions to GNOME and Flathub infrastructure, two projects far more central to the open-source software most of DigitalOcean's own customers run on. Chidlow's post argues the contrast shows a lack of care rather than a lack of resources, since $3 million for one high-visibility Linux distribution and $50 a month for two foundational projects come out of the same budget that has left CSS-Tricks without a public update. Chidlow frames the Omarchy pledge as an example of a company choosing to fund what he calls "a narrow re-packager" of existing tools over open infrastructure that a much wider set of projects, including DigitalOcean's own hosting products, quietly depend on.

The case that this is not the same failure

The 2024 rescue worked once Coyier applied public pressure and Srinivasan answered within days, a response time that suggests DigitalOcean was capable of treating CSS-Tricks as a priority when the alternative was public embarrassment. Nothing in Chidlow's post shows that kind of pressure has been applied this time, or that it has failed after being applied, only that the site has gone quiet again without a Coyier post or a Srinivasan reply attached to it yet. DigitalOcean has also not said anything, in any source reviewed here, about why it chose to fund Omarchy specifically or whether that decision has anything to do with CSS-Tricks at all. Reading the two decisions as connected is Chidlow's framing, not a fact DigitalOcean has confirmed, and a company can fund one project generously while still meaning to return to another it has not yet gotten to.

What would show the difference

If Srinivasan or another DigitalOcean executive responds publicly the way the company did in March 2024, with a named commitment and a timeline rather than silence, the reading that CSS-Tricks has been quietly abandoned again fails. If Coyier, occupied with CodePen 2.0 development, files another public appeal and gets silence back, that would confirm Chidlow's reading in a way this post alone does not. Neither has happened as of Sept. 15, and DigitalOcean's own public channels have said nothing about CSS-Tricks since Graham's return more than two years ago, a gap that stands in contrast to the pattern this site has also tracked in other larger companies absorbing a smaller open-source project, including Yardi's acquisition of Talos Linux maker Sidero Labs and the security debt that followed OpenClaw's rapid growth to 388,000 GitHub stars.