Last week we rolled out an onboarding feature for new users where dev.to suggests folks they may want to follow based on the tags they have selected. We have since been contacted over confusion of people suddenly being followed by "a bunch of brand new accounts".
I can assure you that this is a feature and not a bug. Those new accounts are genuinely new signups. Many have not yet filled out their profiles so it's hard to discern their human qualities. And there are some occasional spam accounts mixed in, but that is happening at a verifiably low rate. All in all this feature means more users following more established contributors. Great for everyone!
Top contributors in popular tags will now get a more consistent flow of new followers if they keep up the great articles. This should help people follow along with the evolving thoughts people are sharing on the subjects they care about. The algorithm favors recentness, so don't feel like you've missed the boat if you haven't written much yet.
We have tried to spread the love so it's not totally top-heavy, so you may get some new followers even if you are not a top contributor.
This feature was built by myself and Andy. He did a wonderful job of making it all come together. Andy is a critical part of all of our success and he killed it on this feature. The confusing roll out here was my fault in the process.
I hope this clarifies things. Feature, not bug! Feature, not bug! Feature, not bug! Since the launching this feature we have had to make some tweaks to the emails we send to make sure folks aren't hammered with emails. So any initial overflow of emails was sort of a bug. But you're welcome to configure your email settings here. So any initial overflow of emails was sort of a bug. I have personally turned off new follower emails. You may want to do the same.
Edit: Speaking of emails, this feature is somewhat related to this feature we also pushed this week after this post.
I think these features are both pretty great for readers and also help the reach of publishers. Keep up the great work community!
Happy coding ❤️
Top comments (29)
I was surprised when it first started happening but it's a great idea to get new people involved!
Most continued contributors should expect thousands of followers eventually—a good base to bank on speaking to whenever you'd like. This will be a mechanic from which to base future product/community decisions.
new followers, how u doin'
Aan I was wondering what was happening! I distrust the internet in general so I assumed it was spam 😂. But this is a good reason to keep my post count up! I've got so many followers, I feel like I can start a religion 🙏
I was crafting an article on the strange followers behaviours until I found this. It is strange, because I witnessed this behaviour since November, 2022. Do you have an explanation for why it suddenly bumps ?
I was just followed by a bunch of bot accounts, and seeing your comment makes me wonder about dev.to...
Yes, me too. I don't have much reactions on my articles, so when I saw the bump of new followers, it made my day. Until I figured those new followers never even saw my articles, thus removing all value to the followers count metric. It is quite depressing really.
Ooooh so that's why! 😮
Followgate 2018 😵
Haha I don't mind!
It actually reminds me that I have to write some more!
"So any initial overflow of emails was sort of a bug. But you're welcome to configure your email settings here. So any initial overflow of emails was sort of a bug."
Is the last repeated sentence a feature or a bug? :)
"We have tried to spread the love so it's not totally top-heavy, so you may get some new followers even if you are not a top contributor."
Is this randomized? Curious how would you implement this.
A bit of randomness, but also just a few adjustments to flatten out the curve to avoid a pure power law distribution. For example, if "scores" are divided like
[1500, 800, 300, 20, 15, 13]we divide the love something like[6,5,4,3,2,1], where the person with "13" gets 1/6th the attention as opposed to 1/115th.The implementation doesn't reflect this exactly but that's the idea.
Is this for new joiners only?
How can i find the top posters for my most interested subject?
Most Interested subject could also be calculated by my user patterns :)
This is currently only for new users, but we'll be making this info more discoverable throughout other parts of the site as well. We're hesitant to put out straight leaderboards unless we did it tastefully. We wouldn't want to make it too much of a competition. So that's why we take our time with these sorts of things.
Thanks for letting us know Andy and Ben! It's good to know that I'm not getting a bunch of spam accounts following me lol.
Feature, not bug. Got it :)
Off topic: is the #changelog tag something only the dev.to team can post to? Is it the ~ * ~ o f f i c i a l ~ * ~ tag to follow for site updates?
Yes and no. We have a concept of tags that require approval, of which it is one. But right now that concept has some loopholes.
But yeah, that is the tag to follow. We typically post to #meta at the same time. At the moment I'd say changelog is a subset of meta but you have the right idea.
TODO: Make more things like this official and less gray area.