[nickjj]

I never understood how dev.to worked from an engagement perspective.

Back in 2018ish I mirror'd some of my blog posts from my personal site to dev.to. Within a few months I had over 7,000 followers by doing nothing other than copy a few posts there with canonical URLs pointing back to my domain. I never tried to gain a following there, all I did was mirror my own posts and answer any questions folks asked in the comments of those posts.

I'll admit I suck at Twitter but I've had an account there for 10 years and while I don't post a ton, I do at least try to tweet something every few days and I have about a third of the followers there as I do on dev.to current day. I don't know, it makes me think something doesn't line up. I have a hunch almost all of the followers I have on dev.to aren't humans because why would so many people follow me on a platform I don't post on much but on Twitter I'm lucky to get ~10 new followers a month? At the same time I've had a few direct chats with the co-founder of dev.to (Ben) over the years and he's a really genuine dude. I can't make sense of the situation. Maybe dev.to is really just super optimized for making it easy for someone to follow you?

As for content, I tend to only create posts and videos on things I encounter in my day to day from any topic related to developing and deploying web apps. That could be anything from using shellcheck's -x flag to live coding a pull request for a third party project. I find it difficult to build a readership with these styles of posts because it's usually some obscure thing I learned while actively working on something, not "10 reasons why XYZ sucks" or something that will get a lot of interaction or be heavily optimized for organic search. The posts are more to reflect on something I've learned so I don't really focus on "gaining an audience", but it would be nice to grow large enough to be able to make courses full time. The process of learning something new, using it in production for a while while understanding it in depth and then distilling that into a video is really fun to me.