A Journey Towards Influence: My Road to 2000 Followers
I remember when I had a few followers - close friends, family, and a couple of ge...
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Congrats!! Haha, I loved the part about being authentic.
I enjoyed the humor, but also just to say totally hear ya on the bot followers. We'll keep working on this!
No, don’t work on it please, I like my 1879 followers and want more please :) (just kidding, would I be able to keep my current followers though, and just only get authentic followers. Because the bot follows are a problem right now)
Haha, I feel you. To be honest, we probably are regularly removing your followers (the spammy ones anyway) and they're likely just refilling with new spam followers.
We changed something in our onboarding logic a while back so that more people get followed during that process based on the tags the new member has chosen to follow. So now, when a member is choosing what tags they'd like to follow during onboarding, the next page (where you choose people to follow) has auto-selected various folks who like to write under those tags. The user has the option to deselect the auto-selected folks, but they rarely do. Spammers generally cruise through onboarding as quick as possible so they can get to spamming. You'll notice that they rarely set their profile pics and so often have our auto-generated ones (grayscale animal pics) — though these aren't always spammers.
Our goal with this update it mostly around getting new folks started with a good, helpful feed. If we suggest users for them to follow who regularly create high quality content, then the new member should have a better feed. But, an unexpected byproduct of all this is that our content creators are getting larger follower counts because they're having a lot more new users follow them — unfortunately, many of these are spammers.
It's not that we've gotten this many more spammers in the past year, but rather that you're seeing them more frequently in your followers.
We're very aware of this issue and have started making some changes to hopefully get the best of both worlds... we don't wanna reverse the change to our onboarding logic because of the good it provides to newbies, but we do wanna filter out potential spammers from y'all followers. Just know that we're working on it!
I love that the dev team is so empathetic to their users. Thanks for making this platform great :)
Really appreciate that, Vendangi! You just made my day. 💚
@michaeltharrington there is a benefit to spam-prevention of your current approach of suggesting followers during onboarding. A few days per week I look at profiles of my most recent 20 or so followers, and flag those with spam posts, spam comments, spam links in their profiles, etc. Spammers following mods can potentially get them noticed quicker.
Wouldn't an "active followers" counter kind of help with this though? As a user, I don't particularly care about some fake account following me, but I'd like to have an idea of how many people will get notified if I post. In that sense, bots and inactive users are probably closer together than they are to active followers.
I actually don't work here anymore, but this is a good suggestion. You might consider sharing this feedback via a feature request on GitHub!
I have nearly 5000 followers, and I suspect about 100 of them, if even that, are real people. It kind of annoys me, because I'd love to know how many people actually get notified when I post something, but instead all I get is a number of how many automated accounts chose me to be the random follow that probably makes their account more realistic or something. No clue what the point even really is.
I have about 1200 followers, and what I learned is to follow your own rules, make interesting content that appeals to a wide audience, and write frequently. This will make you a better writer overall, and when you get a popular post, then you get on the
who to followlist for people making new dev.to accounts.P.S. I like your honesty in the end, LOL
Even I have noticed that not all followers are real ones. It appears that we are followed by automation. And in some cases, it appears that the followers want us to know them rather than they are genuinely interested in our content. They just follow us but do not write any valuable comments or ask questions on the write-up. So I would rather value interacting with real people as a follower than such bots.
Your last paragraph is great. I went into your post with intention of pointing out some of that. I especially like the snarky poke at GPT-4.
Thanks to your text generated with GPT-4, you have gained a true follower: me.
Nice! I’m at like 1900 so I might make this soon.
Is it really true that 90% of the followers on dev.to are bots? :(
I don't really know the number but I suspect it to be high based on the rate of new followers I get without even doing much.
AI overflow === stack overflow
AI community === DEV community
😂 haha!
I am the real example on how I got 529 followers with just 5 blog posts on dev.to :)
The last paragraph = honesty.
That's rare today, might be the key to success.
I am going to create an account for my grandma and follow myself. First and most supportive follower! 😊
Awesome