Is this a common occurrence?
Yesterday I published a post. It didn't get many views (7 at time of writing). That's fine. Par for the course. I would like more people to read my posts, but I'm not eye catching or interesting enough, I get it.
However, I gained 84 followers. My daily average follower increase is 0, so I'm pretty sure the reason is that I posted.
So I make a post, 84 people see I made a post and followed me, but didn't read my post? (Or bookmark it for later)
Why are you following me if you don't want to read my posts? What do you get out of this?
Top comments (6)
I observed similar behavior, what I think happening is that when someone is signing up for the first time dev.to makes recommendations based on who published new content recently. I used the API to do some analysis and I'm fairly confident that's the case. I doubt that all of them are spam accounts, when I researched a bit, a lot of them are signed up via Github and have some activity there.
I almost always get a surge of followers whenever I post something (usually new accounts), but there's little correlation between the number of followers and reads I'm seeing.
I basically concluded that the number of followers is almost completely meaningless, it's just random internet points 🤷
(I thought about writing about my observations, but ultimately decided it wasn't interesting enough, let me know if I misjudged that 😉)
Make the post! :D I'd be interested
You're Right
I got 1000 followers within 4 days. I have been using this platform for 2 years and I recently started posting again, this is the first time that I'm getting that many followers. And like you said there aren't a lot of views in my recent post. I think they are all spam accounts. Most of the accounts that have followed me were made on the same day. Idk what I did to trigger the following chain.
Spam accounts does seem quite likely.
If they are spam accounts, what do you think following provides them? Are they perhaps scraping the site and reposting content else where? Then maybe following means that they get a trigger when to scrape posts.
Does following a lot of people decrease the "spam detection" score?
The foolishness of expecting people who don't read my posts to read this post is not lost on me.
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