Accessibility First DevRel. I focus on ensuring content created, events held and company assets are as accessible as possible, for as many people as possible.
So I wanted to see if a "crap" post (30 minutes to write, low effort...crap is probably a little strong...an average not great post) in a more popular tag can outperform a decent post, even if the "crap" post was released at a terrible time.
If views is the metric then yes (probably obviously) is the answer.
It is part of a bigger experiment to see what sort of promotion posts on accessibility will need, how "clickbaity" titles need to be etc. in order to get a decent reach. (I am about to start writing "for profit"...i.e. to promote something (subtly!) I am going to launch next year so I am trying to be a bit more methodical!)
I do have an advantage that I downloaded every single live post on DEV about 3 months back (10.6GB - and that is without images) so I can do some interesting analysis on best posting times etc. there.
The bottom chart on that page is reasonably accurate as I excluded the top and bottom 5% of posts that skewed things. Needs better analysis, hence why not released a post yet, but I thought I would let you have a look!
Anyway I will post properly on that but I thought you might like a rough idea of what I am up to 😋
Accessibility First DevRel. I focus on ensuring content created, events held and company assets are as accessible as possible, for as many people as possible.
It made it onto Twitter as well, but the idea was also to see if whoever runs the DEV social stuff looked at the quality of articles across the whole site or just picked things out of certain categories (or if it is random what they pick...who knows?!).
They kind of fell right into the trap as a post designed to be promoted and get views with little effort got promoted! 😋🤣
My mega article with one of the highest reactions to view count ratios I have ever had - not a peep of promotion on that one!
It is interesting but more experiments are needed now as you are right, I can't do a direct comparison now 😥
Accessibility First DevRel. I focus on ensuring content created, events held and company assets are as accessible as possible, for as many people as possible.
I have no idea. I would love to know what the criteria is for that, and how on earth you get on the "top 5 comments" list etc. Maybe it is a bot that just randomly picks stuff? Who knows!
I think the top 5 comments is by amount of likes (don't know if the likes of the responses count or not). The top 7 posts is probably a combination of both votes and a human picking, because they often are not the ones with the most votes.
Accessibility First DevRel. I focus on ensuring content created, events held and company assets are as accessible as possible, for as many people as possible.
Maybe it is just something I should be asking with the #meta tag - it would be interesting to know. See if I can game that system too once I know the rules! 😋
But number of likes has very little to do with it from what I can tell...in fact I got "sniped" twice on the a11y tag where I had top post and some random post got promoted...once when I had positions 1, 2 and 3 all at the same time!
Didn't think too much of it until just now, now I am really intrigued at how this actually works? Now I am actually a little annoyed by it now that I am thinking about it...lol!
Accessibility First DevRel. I focus on ensuring content created, events held and company assets are as accessible as possible, for as many people as possible.
You don't think I get promoted often enough for that to be the case do you? 🤣
I am in the middle of writing a post to ask the question so it will be intriguing to see the answer!
Could do with your opinion actually - is it balanced? I am aware at the moment I am a little annoyed that my crap post got the promotion and I don't want it to look like a "boo hoo" post!
So I wanted to see if a "crap" post (30 minutes to write, low effort...crap is probably a little strong...an average not great post) in a more popular tag can outperform a decent post, even if the "crap" post was released at a terrible time.
If views is the metric then yes (probably obviously) is the answer.
It is part of a bigger experiment to see what sort of promotion posts on accessibility will need, how "clickbaity" titles need to be etc. in order to get a decent reach. (I am about to start writing "for profit"...i.e. to promote something (subtly!) I am going to launch next year so I am trying to be a bit more methodical!)
I do have an advantage that I downloaded every single live post on DEV about 3 months back (10.6GB - and that is without images) so I can do some interesting analysis on best posting times etc. there.
inhu.co/dev_to/analyse/timeofday.php
The bottom chart on that page is reasonably accurate as I excluded the top and bottom 5% of posts that skewed things. Needs better analysis, hence why not released a post yet, but I thought I would let you have a look!
Anyway I will post properly on that but I thought you might like a rough idea of what I am up to 😋
😱
It mAde it into the Facebook feed - that probably screws any analysis
It made it onto Twitter as well, but the idea was also to see if whoever runs the DEV social stuff looked at the quality of articles across the whole site or just picked things out of certain categories (or if it is random what they pick...who knows?!).
They kind of fell right into the trap as a post designed to be promoted and get views with little effort got promoted! 😋🤣
My mega article with one of the highest reactions to view count ratios I have ever had - not a peep of promotion on that one!
It is interesting but more experiments are needed now as you are right, I can't do a direct comparison now 😥
Wait... I thought the promoted articles thing was a bot. Is it not a bot? What have I missed? What year is it?
I have no idea. I would love to know what the criteria is for that, and how on earth you get on the "top 5 comments" list etc. Maybe it is a bot that just randomly picks stuff? Who knows!
I think the top 5 comments is by amount of likes (don't know if the likes of the responses count or not). The top 7 posts is probably a combination of both votes and a human picking, because they often are not the ones with the most votes.
Maybe it is just something I should be asking with the #meta tag - it would be interesting to know. See if I can game that system too once I know the rules! 😋
But number of likes has very little to do with it from what I can tell...in fact I got "sniped" twice on the a11y tag where I had top post and some random post got promoted...once when I had positions 1, 2 and 3 all at the same time!
Didn't think too much of it until just now, now I am really intrigued at how this actually works? Now I am actually a little annoyed by it now that I am thinking about it...lol!
Maybe part of the algorithm is "do not select any person that was promoted in the past x days/weeks"?
You don't think I get promoted often enough for that to be the case do you? 🤣
I am in the middle of writing a post to ask the question so it will be intriguing to see the answer!
Could do with your opinion actually - is it balanced? I am aware at the moment I am a little annoyed that my crap post got the promotion and I don't want it to look like a "boo hoo" post!
dev.to/inhuofficial/how-does-the-p...
It looks fine. I kind of hope they reply with something like "we vote for them during our weekly demo/retrospective."