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 selecte...
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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.
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 🙏
new followers, how u doin'
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.
Oh that's why!
I feel flattered that your algorithm selected me for whatever tags it thinks I am a good contributor to.
The algorithm is all-powerful.
HAIL TO THE ALGORITHM
I was wondering the same thing. Nice feature by the way. Platform is growing. 👍
I was wondering about this! I’d assumed a sign up suggestion and I’m touched to be among the suggested. More content for all these new follows coming soon!
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.
But...is it a bug, or a feature? I'm not clear on that. 😉
/s
Cool idea! And I (and I'm sure many others) appreciate the "spreading the love" thing.
Phew, was wondering where that came from.
Guess I gotta get back to writing now. I don't want to disappoint all my new followers...
Was thinking folks were accidentally following me thinking I was some other Michael they knew. Really great new features rolling out from ya'll! Love these changelogs :)
That explains it!