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Discussion on: 500 followers!๐Ÿ˜ฑ๐Ÿคฉ About myself

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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!