dev.to is a thriving community for programmers. Since 2016, a lot of good contents are created, shared and liked.
As a newcomer, I am curious what people care about on dev.to since I want my posts to be relevant.
So I decided to analyze the top 500 posts ever created on dev.to using javascript.
data gathering
There is no API provided by dev.to. But they do already have the ranked posts on this page https://dev.to/top/infinity. All I needed to do was to scroll down until I get 500 posts and scrap the data. Here is the script and data.
There are so many things we can extract from the data. I am interested in the following questions:
- which author is most liked?
- which author gets the most comments?
- which tag is used most frequently?
- do popular posts have numbers in their title?
- vim vs emacs?
And I wrote a script to answer them. Are you also curious? Drumroll, please!
which author is the most liked?
Ali Spittel with 23 posts in top 500 is absolutely the darling of dev.to! I personally find her posts on the topic of blogging really informative and actionable.
Here are the top 10 most liked authors on dev.to!
| name | likes | rank |
|---|---|---|
| Ali Spittel | 9570 | 1 |
| Ben Halpern | 8876 | 2 |
| Alex 👨🏼💻FullStack.Cafe | 3099 | 3 |
| Sarthak Sharma | 2288 | 4 |
| Max Antonucci | 2156 | 5 |
| Nikita Sobolev | 1987 | 6 |
| Emma Wedekind ✨ | 1941 | 7 |
| Blaine Osepchuk | 1698 | 8 |
| Kim Arnett | 1691 | 9 |
| Isaac Lyman | 1594 | 10 |
which author gets the most comments?
As the founder of dev.to, Ben Halpern gets the most comments. Thank you, Ben, for your effort to create such an amazing community!
It should not be surprising that 5 out of top 10 here overlap with top 10 most liked authors.
| name | comments | rank |
|---|---|---|
| Ben Halpern | 1355 | 1 |
| Ali Spittel | 1114 | 2 |
| dev.to staff | 895 | 3 |
| Kim Arnett | 452 | 4 |
| Andrew Davis | 301 | 5 |
| Saurabh sharma | 301 | 6 |
| David Wickes | 271 | 7 |
| Sarthak Sharma | 269 | 8 |
| Dan Abramov | 244 | 9 |
| Max Antonucci | 214 | 10 |
which tag is used most frequently?
Turns out that the most popular tags of the top 500 posts are very similar to the tags on https://dev.to/tags.
Front end engineering is very popular here #javascript, #react. The community seems to be very #beginners friendly.
Aha! I think I can create some react related posts for beginners to get more likes.😜
| tag | used | rank |
|---|---|---|
| #javascript | 128 | 1 |
| #beginners | 126 | 2 |
| #career | 116 | 3 |
| #webdev | 106 | 4 |
| #productivity | 75 | 5 |
| #programming | 49 | 6 |
| #discuss | 39 | 7 |
| #learning | 29 | 8 |
| #react | 26 | 9 |
| #git | 2 | 10 |
do popular posts have numbers in their title?
About 100 posts out of the top 500 have numbers in the title. There does not seem to be any strong correlation between numbers in post title and popularity.
vim vs emacs?
There are 6 #vim and 0 #emacs posts in top 500. For all the vim users out there, I want to say WE ARE THE CHAMPIONS on dev.to!
Just kidding. dev.to is a very inclusive community. It seems neither vim or emacs are very popular topics in the community. I think modern editors like VC code are much more popular.
That's it! And may the best posts win!
Here is the my blog https://trentyang.com/who-is-the-most-liked-author-on-dev-to-analysis-of-top-500-posts/ if you are interested.
Top comments (12)
Cool analysis! It would be interesting to see how this compares to the numbers overall outside of the top 500. But we don't expose that in any super digestible way at the moment.
Fabulously quick rise by @emmawedekind.
Hey Ben, it would be nice if you share some ideas with us on how to create more engaging content. It looks like you are rocking the platform. :-)
best Dennis
:D Thanks Ben!
Hi @ben , it's a pleasure to get feedback from you!
We are already a relatively big community. Just curious, what are your top priorities at this point?
Thank you for the analysis, very cool.
The only thing I would question is:
From what I've experienced, because someone adds a #beginners tag does not necessarily mean that they are a beginner but that the content is geared towards beginners.
There are some very experienced developers on here who write exceptional beginner friendly content because they want to help that part of the community.
Agreed! I am not really a beginner (been doing this professionally at some level since 2014), but I use the beginner tag a lot because I like writing beginner friendly content! I think beginner content does well because it appeals to a broader audience -- niche advanced stuff only applies to few people usually!
Do you target the beginner niche with your blog posts? Or do you also add more advanced posts into the mix?
No doubt there are experienced engineers here and some very in-depth posts that I have read. I should have been more careful with my reasoning. I think I jumped to conclusion too quickly.
Maybe there are some bias from my own experience after reading popular posts and I put it in the post without too much critics.
Would it be fair to say the community if very beginner friendly?
BTW I am totally not an expert in data science or even statistics. I just thought it's kind of fun to play with the metadata.
My interpretation is that more #beginner posts means we can infer from that one data point that there is more beginner friendly content, rather than more beginner members.
In my experience, the beginner-friendly content is accessible to everyone so has the potential to be 'liked' by both experienced and inexperienced members, while the niche and more in-depth content has a more limited audience.
Hope that doesn't sound like I'm splitting hairs, I really enjoyed the article!
I particularly liked the point about using numbers in a post title and whether that correlates to more likes. Interesting stuff :)
Oh woah, that's really interesting -- would not have expected that! Thank you DEV community ❤️!
Wow, honored to be on the same list with all those awesome writers.
That was really informative and helpful, thanks Trent!