Humanist living the Colorado life, w/ a modicum of scripting experience. My background is across multiple industries (mostly contract work). Emotional intelligence > Artificial Intelligence
This is overall a situation where a lot of folks follow during onboarding and a decent percentage of them don’t ultimately become very active beyond lurking. Net engagement is way up but average engagement is still mostly just lurking.
There are some bots here and there but this experience would be largely inactive or not-yet-active users.
Taking advantage of @ben
reply, I would like to explain my statement well: I'm a lurker myself..don't have a single post,only fews comments; it happened that (and it happens in waves) I have some follower emails. Checking the follower profile, it shows that it is just created... So, I don't really understand why anyone can make a profile only to follow me...I'm not an influencer here! [moreover all this is not related to my (low) activity].
If a user doesn't select any tags they are interested in, one of the buckets we draw from for follows are recently active users, which is in theory an indication of likelihood that they will produce interesting things to say more often.
It's likely you occasionally fall into this bucket.
I don't know if this is the right way to do things, and honestly we've just let this confusion linger too long. But it is the explanation.
It checks that they have at least a few comments, and that they have commented lately. This whole functionality needs to be rejiggered, but this path is not the primary path so anyone in this category gets a dribble of occasional followers. I think by making it a little more clear in the UI the difference between followers on onboarding and followers derived through the app would help the problem regardless of the algorithm.
👋 Hey there, I am Waylon Walker
I am a Husband, Father of two beautiful children, Senior Python Developer currently working in the Data Engineering platform space. I am a continuous learner, and sha
You are right, some part of followers are bots or unactive users. But, I have noticed, that if you start to post consistently - you start to get "real" and active followers.
Programmer, humorist. Host of the Citizen Coder Podcast. I interview developers from all over the world, from beginners trying to break into the industry to senior devs.
I definitely have noticed the uptick in more active followers. I've been posting at least once a week for 8 weeks (my first post was on Dec 5). Some people have popped over from twitter to read my posts, but I get new followers almost daily now, so I think having consistency in posting helps.
I have 121 followers, but I think they are bots...
I've noticed a few obvious bot accounts on Dev. Fake profile pictures also on a few. I hope it doesn't get out of hand 😳
Don't expect too much.
I had the experience that active followers are in the single digit percent range.
If you have under 1k followers, you can consider yourself to be lucky if you get >10 reactions once in a while, let alone some comments, haha.
This is overall a situation where a lot of folks follow during onboarding and a decent percentage of them don’t ultimately become very active beyond lurking. Net engagement is way up but average engagement is still mostly just lurking.
There are some bots here and there but this experience would be largely inactive or not-yet-active users.
Sounds reasonable. Often 10 times more people view an article than they react on it.
Taking advantage of @ben reply, I would like to explain my statement well: I'm a lurker myself..don't have a single post,only fews comments; it happened that (and it happens in waves) I have some follower emails. Checking the follower profile, it shows that it is just created... So, I don't really understand why anyone can make a profile only to follow me...I'm not an influencer here! [moreover all this is not related to my (low) activity].
Maybe, it's some kind of bug that lets people follow each other by accident once in a while xD
This is the file in the codebase where we determine who is suggested as a possible follow during onboarding.
github.com/thepracticaldev/dev.to/...
If a user doesn't select any tags they are interested in, one of the buckets we draw from for follows are recently active users, which is in theory an indication of likelihood that they will produce interesting things to say more often.
It's likely you occasionally fall into this bucket.
I don't know if this is the right way to do things, and honestly we've just let this confusion linger too long. But it is the explanation.
Does it at least check that the user to follow has a few posts?
It checks that they have at least a few comments, and that they have commented lately. This whole functionality needs to be rejiggered, but this path is not the primary path so anyone in this category gets a dribble of occasional followers. I think by making it a little more clear in the UI the difference between followers on onboarding and followers derived through the app would help the problem regardless of the algorithm.
Well, at least found the culprit :D
yes, good to know
Thanks for clarifying Ben!
You are right, some part of followers are bots or unactive users. But, I have noticed, that if you start to post consistently - you start to get "real" and active followers.
I definitely have noticed the uptick in more active followers. I've been posting at least once a week for 8 weeks (my first post was on Dec 5). Some people have popped over from twitter to read my posts, but I get new followers almost daily now, so I think having consistency in posting helps.
lol be strong my friend maybe its just bot creating another bot