Comment by shimman
3 hours ago
Always felt like the worst aspect of code pen was the exploratory side. Looking up codepens is extremely poor, you often only look up one "tag" and after the first page quality gets worse.
Wish it had an advanced search that I can filter codepens for something useful like this: animejs, svg, forms; with the result being codepens that use anime.js around a form.
I'd probably use codepen as the defacto web ui reference if it had better search capabilities. Right now it's mostly github + blogs, but only because it's so hard to find anything worthwhile on codepen. Gold is there but it's deep under the strata with no willing to actually get it.
This should be the top comment, especially since organic search has been lost. Not to be overly critical because Codepen was great in its time, but it's now on individual websites to upgrade their search game if they want to stay relevant and useful.
Edit: Just noticed that logging in is now required for search. I'm sure this is an attempt to prevent AI scraping, etc., but it's a big mistake IMHO. While I have an account, I don't log in much and tend to abandon sites that require log in. Among nerds, I'm probably not the only one like this.