Yesterday I got an email from dev.to covering a significant spike in my followers:
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:
So did I write something compelling this week that caused it?
No:
In fact, if we look at these statistics for the past month this spike makes even less sense:
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 (14)
We have adjusted the logic in onboarding so that more people get followed in that process based on the tags the member has followed. 🙂
I checked a number of my new followers and unfortunately most of them look like spam accounts 😬
I don´t know if the accounts are spams but today my followers increase and a lot of them join today in the plataform
:/
Thanks for explaining that @ben! I got a spike in followers too and I wasn't sure exactly why. Thanks!
That's very cool, looks like it's working nicely!
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.
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.
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.
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.
got some too
nice
Legendary number 😭😂
quite magical 😂
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)