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Ben Lovy
Ben Lovy

Posted on

Old post surging?

EDIT: Aha:

That'd sure do it. Thanks! There's a bunch of good robot vacuum commentary there, and a few people calling me an asshole for disrespecting my significant other (it was a joke, really).

Just curious here, mostly.

DEV posts in general have an incredibly short lifetime - a few hours for most, maybe a few days if you managed to hit on something interesting. Generally, after that time, I stop seeing any new reactions entirely by the third or fourth day after posting.

This week though, I've received a flurry of activity in the form of reactions, new comments, and even direct messages to my email address, on a post I made last July:

How and why is that happening? Are we all just spending more time at home and deep diving through DEV links? If so, why that post in particular? Was it linked somewhere externally? Is there any way for me to tell?

It doesn't matter, really, this has just never happened to a DEV post of mine. Some of my more popular articles will get an intermittent "heart" every so often well after publishing, but this has almost felt like it's been back on the feed.

Photo by bruce mars on Unsplash

Top comments (17)

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egilhuber profile image
erica (she/her)

I can't say anything for sure about surging, but I see a lot of and interact with old posts. They're usually below whatever I'm reading as a classic DEV post or a suggested post.

Maybe you wrote a classic!

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royalaid profile image
Mark Aiken
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deciduously profile image
Ben Lovy

Aha - definitely. Weird! Thanks for the link, I'm rarely on HN.

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theodesp profile image
Theofanis Despoudis • Edited

I'm rarely on HN.

Good for you. Reading too much HN seems to cause Coronavirus related symptoms according to the latest studies😂

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jasterix profile image
Jasterix

Do you know how a post might end up on the Google discover feed? This randomly happened to me.

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deciduously profile image
Ben Lovy

Yeah, I actually see mine pop up there from time to time, too. No clue how Google's scrapers work, but your results are individualized. I assume it's because I spend a good amount of time reading about the same things I write about.

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theodesp profile image
Theofanis Despoudis

Well, you can say that you wrote some hidden treasures...

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deciduously profile image
Ben Lovy

Ah, sounds like "got linked somewhere" is the culprit :)

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codemouse92 profile image
Jason C. McDonald

I did enjoy that article very much, but didn't connect until just now it was yours! Don't let the wet blankets and armchair critics get you down. It was funny. :3

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deciduously profile image
Ben Lovy

#deepcuts

Oh, I'm not - just think it's striking to see the difference between DEV and HN (or anywhere else) comment threads. Her jimmies weren't rustled, I'm not too concerned about a few stray netizens. All told, I was thrilled to read through all the new commentary there, I was not expecting to learn a bunch more about these things again nearly a year after the fact.

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codemouse92 profile image
Jason C. McDonald

Indeed, always exciting!

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nasidulislam profile image
Nasidul Islam

Maybe someone linked your article in a new one they wrote (as reference). In any case, were you able to find out what the actual reason is?

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deciduously profile image
Ben Lovy

Turn out someone posted it to HackerNews :)

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nasidulislam profile image
Nasidul Islam

haha there you go --- although someone posting your content on another platform without your knowledge can be an issue

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deciduously profile image
Ben Lovy

True - but DEV posts are public domain and this was a link to the actual article here, not a copied text. I'm not too concerned, but it is something to watch for.

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nasidulislam profile image
Nasidul Islam

right on. good luck mate !

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jasterix profile image
Jasterix

I agree it's a little odd. One of my friends messaged my that a random DEV post I wrote showed up on his Google discover feed. No idea why or how