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Who is the most liked author on dev.to? - Analysis of top 500 posts

Trent Yang on January 09, 2019

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...
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Ben Halpern

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.

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Dennis Groß (he/him)

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

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Emma Bostian ✨

:D Thanks Ben!

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Trent Yang

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?

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Helen Anderson

Thank you for the analysis, very cool.

The only thing I would question is:

It seems folks on dev.on are relatively new to programming #beginners.

After analyzing the top 500 posts on dev.to, I found that web developers on their early career are the predominant members on dev.to.

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.

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Ali Spittel

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!

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Dennis Groß (he/him)

Do you target the beginner niche with your blog posts? Or do you also add more advanced posts into the mix?

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Trent Yang

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.

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Helen Anderson

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 :)

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Ali Spittel • Edited

Oh woah, that's really interesting -- would not have expected that! Thank you DEV community ❤️!

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Isaac Lyman

Wow, honored to be on the same list with all those awesome writers.

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Dennis Groß (he/him)

That was really informative and helpful, thanks Trent!