If you write or comment regularly you have to wonder at some point why do you gain followers. It comes down to numbers, though I am not even sure the follower recommendations are based on tags you follow.

I first joined the site in Oct 2018, and didn't post until January so for the last 8 months I have been gaining followers like crazy, but I have to assume most people have the same or more followers than me lol.

I am sitting at 6.5K followers (def not bragging just for reference), and I do post articles irregularly and I also engage with comments. What I've noticed is that once I post an article, the follower count skyrockets. It continues to skyrocket for the next week, and then at some point it reaches a peak, and comes down. If I don't post or comment at all, it will eventually go down to 0.

Is this algorithm good?

In thisvideo I attempt to look in the dev.to source code, trying to figure out how it works. It is a numbers game, post, and comment regularly and you will gain followers no matter what.

Here are some assumptions on how I think it works:

Request when signing up (onboarding slides): (you can do the following request on your browser, though I recommend using a json plugin, or just use postman)

https://dev.to/api/users?state=follow_suggestions

• have X amount of recent articles (could be current month?, maybe two months)
• have X amount of recent comments
• I don't know if the users suggested are matched against your following tags
• I don't know if the more reactions you have, the higher you rank in this list

How do you feel about random followers?

As I've said in the video, is hard to keep up with the followers since only the last 100 or less are shown, I do occasionally try to follow back some if they have written articles, or an active github account. I've noticed spam accounts trying to send you to a short url probably a fishing site or malware.

• How many actual followers read your articles because of this following suggestion?
• Would you be able to engage better by having true followers?
• Would the follow suggestions be better after knowing what you read and post, rather than initial onboarding?