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Who’s Really Following You on Dev.to? A Guide to Analyzing Your Audience

Olga Braginskaya on November 13, 2024

The reason I’m writing this post is to shed some light on an aspect of Dev.to that many of us don’t think twice about: our followers. We put so muc...
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Maurice Borgmeier

Really cool, I did something similar with my followers that I didn't publish :D

This left me wondering — did these people see my article and decide to join Dev.to on the spot? Or is it the other way around: they joined Dev.to and somehow stumbled upon my article that same day? Either way, the sheer volume of same-day followers was surprising and definitely raised a few questions in my mind about how genuine this engagement might be.

I checked this with a friend - when you sign up, dev.to recommends you authors to follow and this appears to be based on recently published posts. For me the spike in followers when I publish something rarely matches the number of views.

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Olga Braginskaya

Good catch about "recommends you authors to follow", didn't think of it

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Jan Küster

Established active user here. I just followed you 👋

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Anna Villarreal

This is awesome 👌

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ANIRUDDHA

just wow ♥️.

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Lucas Chitolina

(I haven't read the article yet, I haven't had time)

But what makes me wonder the most is how I have 10k followers and that doesn't reflect on the number of views on my articles

Like, I know there's interest in the content itself, but it's really weird that I have 10k and only 100 people read my last article

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Olga Braginskaya

I find the ratio of views, reads, and followers on Dev.to quite disturbing

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kvetoslavnovak

I've had a similar experience. After posting, there's usually a significant increase in followers, but other metrics seem out of sync. It feels like something fishy is going on.

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Olga Braginskaya

so I can agree that raise of followers maybe connected to the fact that Dev.to suggesting profiles to follow during onboarding but views count seems wrong

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Vika Khodichenko

wow! great article

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Ayak22

This is really interesting and so well done, thanks for sharing!

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Alex Iscanderov

Just a masterpiece of analysis, applause!

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Tochi

Your Data skills blow my mind, thanks for sharing

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Ben Sinclair

As to the "same day joiners" stats, I think dev used to suggest people to follow as part of the onboarding journey, so you could get a spike from that instead of any particular article.

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Olga Braginskaya

I may agree with you. I've noticed others sharing the same thought about Dev suggesting profiles to follow during onboarding. It makes a lot of sense and could definitely explain the spike in 'same day joiners.