I'm guessing that is what happened. Maybe it was a clause in the contract? If Chris reads this comment maybe he can chime in to clarify. I should have made that clear in my original comment, though.

I found out about it by doing keyword research for a piece I was doing. Better.dev was one of the sites that ranked extremely well for it and I hadn't heard of the name before. Upon closer inspection, I learned that the post is an old Scotch.io article which is being redirected to his new project.

Scotch.io redirects to Digital Ocean Community site when I checked just now. I imagine a big reason it was acquired for the sweet domain authority for SEO.

You can see that Scotch.io was dying off in traffic [1] - I would assume it wasn't getting new content regularly enough. The domain is pretty powerful, so even pushing some traffic to Better.dev [2] via 301's would have helped both sites out.

I imagine better.dev would have agreed to promote DO and put some links on their top pages to give the DigitalOcean domain even more SEO power.

[1] - https://imgur.com/a/ashZPDa [2] - https://imgur.com/a/Wd9kzJt