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Discussion on: 500 followers! What can I do to improve?

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progrium profile image
Jeff Lindsay

lol is dev.to tricking us? why do they keep other peoples follower count a secret?

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awwsmm profile image
Andrew (he/him)

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

Follow recommendations upon signup are where a lot of follows come from. Recommendations are based on people who have recently been active in various tags.

We try our best to make the recommendations relevant, but it's just an algorithm.

We also have a huge surplus of readers to writers in general. So all writers of any kind get lots of followers.

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awwsmm profile image
Andrew (he/him)

Any chance you'll make site statistics public knowledge? # signups, % active authors, etc.?

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codevault profile image
Sergiu Mureşan

@ben : Does this mean most of our followers aren't bots but instead just accounts that are active in the first few days, follow some people and tags, then completely abandon the website?

I have been looking through my own followers and many just have tons of tags they follow and no comments or posts while also having the exact same profile picture as their GitHub one.

Was thinking that someone created a bot that is just scraping GitHub for users and simply impersonates all of them... for whatever reason.
This is a bit worrying.

Am I understanding this right?

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

Yes, this is correct. Except people aren't typically abandoning the site, but most people don't comment or post even leave reactions. We'll have to keep trying to make people feel comfortable taking part and not just reading.

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codevault profile image
Sergiu Mureşan

Then that is absolutely amazing, I am very glad that bots are not the problem here. The community is growing, and is growing fast! And that means you guys are doing a great job at managing it.

From what I noticed, many social media platforms have way more "reading" people than "writing" ones. Most of the content is top notch as well, so I think you shouldn't worry too much about it. May just be an unfixable problem...

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oleksandr profile image
Oleksandr

Maybe mailing weekly digest and assigning rate for activity will make users more active?