I've been a professional C, Perl, PHP and Python developer.
I'm an ex-sysadmin from the late 20th century.
These days I do more Javascript and CSS and whatnot, and promote UX and accessibility.
Well you can turn that off at /settings/notifications if you find it annoying (personally I turn pretty much everything off!).
I haven't read the source for dev.to but you can see exactly what its algorithms are if you want. That said...
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I suspect when you visit, your account gets marked as recently active, which makes it more likely to be picked as a suggestion to follow for new signups. I seem to remember that when you first join, it offers you some topics and people to follow based on them. My notifications include "x people followed you" sometimes, and it's much more common after I've made a post, for example, even sometimes exceeding the number of views that post seems to have had.
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We're a place where coders share, stay up-to-date and grow their careers.
Well you can turn that off at /settings/notifications if you find it annoying (personally I turn pretty much everything off!).
I haven't read the source for dev.to but you can see exactly what its algorithms are if you want. That said...
BEGIN SPECULATION
I suspect when you visit, your account gets marked as recently active, which makes it more likely to be picked as a suggestion to follow for new signups. I seem to remember that when you first join, it offers you some topics and people to follow based on them. My notifications include "x people followed you" sometimes, and it's much more common after I've made a post, for example, even sometimes exceeding the number of views that post seems to have had.
END SPECULATION