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Shai Almog
Shai Almog

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Weird Follower Spike on Dev.to

Yesterday I got an email from dev.to covering a significant spike in my followers:

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I typically get a few subscribers every day but this is a big jump. I chucked it up to "I'm probably doing something right" and moved on. Today I got an email with even more subscribers.

I'm not the type of person to let things go. That's important in our profession. I need to know why subscription is up? What happened?

First place I went is the dev.to dashboard and indeed followers are rising. Today there's a slope but it could be because of the hour of the day:

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So did I write something compelling this week that caused it?

No:

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In fact, if we look at these statistics for the past month this spike makes even less sense:

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I blog on other platforms too and I checked my socials. It doesn't seem that this spike is correlated in other platforms. My only guess is that someone featured my account and asked people to subscribe but it's hard to find the source of that.

Looking at the traffic sources in the analytics dashboard I can't see a specific reason. Curious if other dev.to bloggers experienced something similar or have an idea?

Top comments (13)

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

We have adjusted the logic in onboarding so that more people get followed in that process based on the tags the member has followed. 🙂

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bradstondev profile image
Bradston Henry

Thanks for explaining that @ben! I got a spike in followers too and I wasn't sure exactly why. Thanks!

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t4rzsan profile image
Jakob Christensen

I checked a number of my new followers and unfortunately most of them look like spam accounts 😬

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codenameone profile image
Shai Almog

That's very cool, looks like it's working nicely!

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balastrong profile image
Leonardo Montini

That's curious, same here! I didn't pay too much attention because I have an article that performed well recently, but the subscribers spike is actually a couple of days later.

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joelbonetr profile image
JoelBonetR 🥇

I've observed that posts that attract most people within the platform usually get featured in the Android left bar later on (you know, when you swipe left in the home screen, can't remember the official name 😅) so it gets pushed for the next some hours after this.

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hunghvu profile image
Hung Vu

I think most followers are from dev.to recommendation when new users join in. There might be a wave of new users, or something changed in the algorithm. I observed the same activity.

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cicirello profile image
Vincent A. Cicirello

I had a significant spike in followers yesterday as well. I'm guessing either DEV changed something in how users to follow are recommended, or there was a spike in new DEV users.

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_eduard26 profile image
Eduard Constantin

got some too

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

nice

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soumyadeepdey profile image
Soumyadeep Dey ☑️

Legendary number 😭😂

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_eduard26 profile image
Eduard Constantin

quite magical 😂

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cloudnative_eng profile image
Cloud Native Engineer

I got 600 followers in 2 days. Most of them seems Spam since they joined the platform today or yesterday (same day that became my followers)