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Changelog: Suggested follows on onboarding!

Ben Halpern on March 27, 2018

Last week we rolled out an onboarding feature for new users where dev.to suggests folks they may want to follow based on the tags they have selecte...
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Meghan (she/her) • Edited

volkswagen bug with a "feature" license plate

I was surprised when it first started happening but it's a great idea to get new people involved!

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Ben Halpern

Most continued contributors should expect thousands of followers eventually—a good base to bank on speaking to whenever you'd like. This will be a mechanic from which to base future product/community decisions.

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Belhassen Chelbi • Edited

new followers, how u doin'
how u doin'

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Arden de Raaij

Aan I was wondering what was happening! I distrust the internet in general so I assumed it was spam 😂. But this is a good reason to keep my post count up! I've got so many followers, I feel like I can start a religion 🙏

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Lucy Linder • Edited

I was crafting an article on the strange followers behaviours until I found this. It is strange, because I witnessed this behaviour since November, 2022. Do you have an explanation for why it suddenly bumps ?

follow-vs-join

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Natália Oliveira

I was just followed by a bunch of bot accounts, and seeing your comment makes me wonder about dev.to...

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Lucy Linder

Yes, me too. I don't have much reactions on my articles, so when I saw the bump of new followers, it made my day. Until I figured those new followers never even saw my articles, thus removing all value to the followers count metric. It is quite depressing really.

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Massimo Artizzu

Ooooh so that's why! 😮

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Ben Halpern

Followgate 2018 😵

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Massimo Artizzu

Haha I don't mind!
It actually reminds me that I have to write some more!

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Yann Rabiller

"So any initial overflow of emails was sort of a bug. But you're welcome to configure your email settings here. So any initial overflow of emails was sort of a bug."

Is the last repeated sentence a feature or a bug? :)

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Enrique Jose Padilla

"We have tried to spread the love so it's not totally top-heavy, so you may get some new followers even if you are not a top contributor."

Is this randomized? Curious how would you implement this.

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Ben Halpern

A bit of randomness, but also just a few adjustments to flatten out the curve to avoid a pure power law distribution. For example, if "scores" are divided like [1500, 800, 300, 20, 15, 13] we divide the love something like [6,5,4,3,2,1], where the person with "13" gets 1/6th the attention as opposed to 1/115th.

The implementation doesn't reflect this exactly but that's the idea.

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Enrique Jose Padilla

Is this for new joiners only?

How can i find the top posters for my most interested subject?
Most Interested subject could also be calculated by my user patterns :)

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Ben Halpern

This is currently only for new users, but we'll be making this info more discoverable throughout other parts of the site as well. We're hesitant to put out straight leaderboards unless we did it tastefully. We wouldn't want to make it too much of a competition. So that's why we take our time with these sorts of things.

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Jake Varness

Thanks for letting us know Andy and Ben! It's good to know that I'm not getting a bunch of spam accounts following me lol.

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Jakob Christensen

Feature, not bug. Got it :)

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Daniel Golant

Off topic: is the #changelog tag something only the dev.to team can post to? Is it the ~ * ~ o f f i c i a l ~ * ~ tag to follow for site updates?

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Ben Halpern

Yes and no. We have a concept of tags that require approval, of which it is one. But right now that concept has some loopholes.

But yeah, that is the tag to follow. We typically post to #meta at the same time. At the moment I'd say changelog is a subset of meta but you have the right idea.

TODO: Make more things like this official and less gray area.

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Steven Washington

But...is it a bug, or a feature? I'm not clear on that. 😉

/s

Cool idea! And I (and I'm sure many others) appreciate the "spreading the love" thing.

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Salim MAHBOUBI

Oh that's why!
I feel flattered that your algorithm selected me for whatever tags it thinks I am a good contributor to.

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Ben Halpern

The algorithm is all-powerful.

HAIL TO THE ALGORITHM

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Ahmad Awais ⚡️

I was wondering the same thing. Nice feature by the way. Platform is growing. 👍

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Phil Nash

I was wondering about this! I’d assumed a sign up suggestion and I’m touched to be among the suggested. More content for all these new follows coming soon!

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Swastik Baranwal

That explains it!

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Sultan Akhter

Bro, i have more followers than total views, but it feels good to see the no. of followers increasing after every post.

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Michael Lee 🍕

Was thinking folks were accidentally following me thinking I was some other Michael they knew. Really great new features rolling out from ya'll! Love these changelogs :)

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Yechiel Kalmenson

Phew, was wondering where that came from.

Guess I gotta get back to writing now. I don't want to disappoint all my new followers...

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Stephen Nwankwo

what is the use if you don't show our followers our post