Study finds 92% of dev.to posts receive zero reactions due to hidden feed curation

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A developer used dev.to's public API to test widely circulated advice about what makes posts perform well on the platform, such as using numbers in titles or posting on Tuesday mornings. Before reaching those questions, the analysis revealed a stark reality: when sampling posts by random article ID rather than the curated feed, 91.7% of August 2024 posts received no reactions and 95.7% received no comments. The curated feed, which most readers experience, showed a median of 15 reactions per post, masking the near-total silence facing the vast majority of content. The investigation also found that paging through tag-based API listings is unreliable, as pages overlap, skip posts non-randomly, and skew results toward better-performing content. The findings suggest that standard engagement advice for dev.to is based on a filtered, unrepresentative view of the platform rather than its actual publishing environment.

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