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Discussion on: 3 general 🚀 Productivity 🚀 tools you should be using that you possibly haven't heard of ⁉

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grahamthedev profile image
GrahamTheDev • Edited

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 😋

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alvaromontoro profile image
Alvaro Montoro

😱

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leadegroot profile image
Lea de Groot

It mAde it into the Facebook feed - that probably screws any analysis

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grahamthedev profile image
GrahamTheDev • Edited

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 😥

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alvaromontoro profile image
Alvaro Montoro

Wait... I thought the promoted articles thing was a bot. Is it not a bot? What have I missed? What year is it?

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grahamthedev profile image
GrahamTheDev

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!

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alvaromontoro profile image
Alvaro Montoro • Edited

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.

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grahamthedev profile image
GrahamTheDev • Edited

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!

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alvaromontoro profile image
Alvaro Montoro

Maybe part of the algorithm is "do not select any person that was promoted in the past x days/weeks"?

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grahamthedev profile image
GrahamTheDev

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...

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alvaromontoro profile image
Alvaro Montoro

It looks fine. I kind of hope they reply with something like "we vote for them during our weekly demo/retrospective."