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Cover image for 500 followers!๐Ÿ˜ฑ๐Ÿคฉ About myself
Alexandra Grazhevskaja
Alexandra Grazhevskaja

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500 followers!๐Ÿ˜ฑ๐Ÿคฉ About myself

Few days ago I celebrated my first 500 followers on Dev.To.๐ŸŽ‰
Actually, YOU ๐Ÿ‘‹ are first 500 followers in my life, and I am glad that it happend on Dev.To. It is a friendly and intelligent environment of nice, professional and passionate people!

I skipped to write the introduction post at the very begining, so I would like to do that now.

Who I am?

I am an IT girl.๐Ÿ‘ฉโ€๐Ÿ’ป Yes, so short.๐Ÿ’โ€โ™€๏ธ

Actually, I have a mixed education and experience: linguistic, engineering and scientific. But, what have always been a significant part of my life - is languages:

  1. I studied human languages in the lingustic gymnasium. I was even supposed to become a professional linguist.
  2. Then I learned programming languages at IT university and developerโ€™s job. I even worked to create my own programming language while being a postgraduate.
  3. Now, I am learning marketing language.

These three skills help me to be who I am. Programming have taught me to structure information in my mind, lingustics - to structure it on paper and marketing tells how to introduce information after all.๐Ÿ‘†

Why I am here?

I am here for both fun and job.

I want to enjoy communication with like minded people, learn and share. This is my first blogging experience and I hope to improve myself in that. I had some written experience before: scientific articles, technical articles, esses, etc. But, writting on Dev.To is a new format for me - it requires more collaboration and understanding the audience.

I want to tell you about Aspose products, because they are great.๐Ÿ™Œโญ๏ธ
I am Developer Evangelist in Aspose - yes, the role, that nobody knows what is it.๐Ÿ˜
For me, being Developer Evangelist means - showing you that Aspose products are great, as well as doing everything to make them better for you.
I have already published few posts about Aspose.Slides, and it seems you liked them:


What do you want to know about Aspose.Slides and presentations?
What do you want to know about me?๐Ÿ‘‡๐Ÿ‘‡๐Ÿ‘‡

Top comments (29)

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nicolaerario profile image
Nicola Erario

I have 121 followers, but I think they are bots...

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skyandsand profile image
Chris C

I've noticed a few obvious bot accounts on Dev. Fake profile pictures also on a few. I hope it doesn't get out of hand ๐Ÿ˜ณ

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kayis profile image
K

Don't expect too much.

I had the experience that active followers are in the single digit percent range.

If you have under 1k followers, you can consider yourself to be lucky if you get >10 reactions once in a while, let alone some comments, haha.

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

This is overall a situation where a lot of folks follow during onboarding and a decent percentage of them donโ€™t ultimately become very active beyond lurking. Net engagement is way up but average engagement is still mostly just lurking.

There are some bots here and there but this experience would be largely inactive or not-yet-active users.

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kayis profile image
K

Sounds reasonable. Often 10 times more people view an article than they react on it.

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nicolaerario profile image
Nicola Erario

Taking advantage of @ben reply, I would like to explain my statement well: I'm a lurker myself..don't have a single post,only fews comments; it happened that (and it happens in waves) I have some follower emails. Checking the follower profile, it shows that it is just created... So, I don't really understand why anyone can make a profile only to follow me...I'm not an influencer here! [moreover all this is not related to my (low) activity].

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kayis profile image
K

Maybe, it's some kind of bug that lets people follow each other by accident once in a while xD

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern • Edited

This is the file in the codebase where we determine who is suggested as a possible follow during onboarding.

github.com/thepracticaldev/dev.to/...

If a user doesn't select any tags they are interested in, one of the buckets we draw from for follows are recently active users, which is in theory an indication of likelihood that they will produce interesting things to say more often.

It's likely you occasionally fall into this bucket.

I don't know if this is the right way to do things, and honestly we've just let this confusion linger too long. But it is the explanation.

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kayis profile image
K • Edited

Does it at least check that the user to follow has a few posts?

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

It checks that they have at least a few comments, and that they have commented lately. This whole functionality needs to be rejiggered, but this path is not the primary path so anyone in this category gets a dribble of occasional followers. I think by making it a little more clear in the UI the difference between followers on onboarding and followers derived through the app would help the problem regardless of the algorithm.

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kayis profile image
K

Well, at least found the culprit :D

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nicolaerario profile image
Nicola Erario

yes, good to know

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waylonwalker profile image
Waylon Walker

Thanks for clarifying Ben!

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grazhevskaja profile image
Alexandra Grazhevskaja • Edited

You are right, some part of followers are bots or unactive users. But, I have noticed, that if you start to post consistently - you start to get "real" and active followers.

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andevr profile image
drew

I definitely have noticed the uptick in more active followers. I've been posting at least once a week for 8 weeks (my first post was on Dec 5). Some people have popped over from twitter to read my posts, but I get new followers almost daily now, so I think having consistency in posting helps.

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spiritupbro profile image
spiritupbro

lol be strong my friend maybe its just bot creating another bot

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anwar_nairi profile image
Anwar

Congrats Alexandra, great milestone! Keep up the good articles :)

I have quicly browsed Apsose website, seems to be a great tool (mostly the PDF generation/manipulation). Do you think it will be able to use Apsose for Javascript?

(P.S.: this poster picture cracks me up xD)

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grazhevskaja profile image
Alexandra Grazhevskaja • Edited

Thank you!๐Ÿ˜Š

Aspose has Cloud APIs as well.
And, there is support for NodeJS, for example:

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kayis profile image
K • Edited

Congrats!

Took me a year to get to 1000 and another one to get to 10000.

Consitency is the key!

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grazhevskaja profile image
Alexandra Grazhevskaja

Thank you!
Yes, consistency is important. If you stop posting - the "show" stops.

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adnanbabakan profile image
Adnan Babakan (he/him)

Congrats for your 500 followers! I only have 416 XD

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grazhevskaja profile image
Alexandra Grazhevskaja

Just few more and we can congratulate you too!

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adnanbabakan profile image
Adnan Babakan (he/him)

Hahahaha

 
skyandsand profile image
Chris C

Twitter absolutely has not mitigated bots. I'm on there every day and it is full of canned political posts. Am a voluntary mod on DEV if you have a specific post you want to report you should be able to report abuse

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waylonwalker profile image
Waylon Walker

๐ŸŽ‰ Congrats!!!

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delta456 profile image
Swastik Baranwal

Nice great going! I almost got 4k followers in these 4 or 5 months which is surprising because I only wrote few articles.