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Ahmed Musallam
Ahmed Musallam

Posted on

How dev.to cleverly used FOMO to attract users to sign in

FOMO
/ˈfōmō/
anxiety that an exciting or interesting event may currently be happening elsewhere, often aroused by posts seen on a social media website.

It could be just me, but when I opened dev.to for the first time I saw the "bell" icon in the top right corner with a red notification stamp; like the one you'd see on apps when you've got a notification.

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I... Just... Could not help it... I had to click it...

I thought this was very clever, so my hat's off to whomever came up with that! Had it been the traditional "log in" or "signup" button, I probably would have not clicked it or even considered signing up.

Regardless of the "bell" I would have signed up anyway because I love reading dev.to's awesome community posts! but the "bell" made it a bit more enticing.

Top comments (4)

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nektro profile image
Meghan (she/her)

I wish they would change the 1 to a ! or something similar but not a 1 because I had a bunch of times in the past where my cookies got pretty regularly messed up when viewing articles in the Twitter app and I couldn't tell the difference between having a notification or something had gone haywire.

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ahmedmusallam profile image
Ahmed Musallam

Wow, I have not thought about it that way (new member here, haha) But completely agree! I think it makes sense to have that distinction.

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nektro profile image
Meghan (she/her)

Welcome! Glad your here! I thought it was a really good idea overall but it definitely tricked me a couple times when the team first put it in lol

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jess profile image
Jess Lee

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