The original title is "Six articles, 200 views. So I read the feed's source code."

Short summary

After six articles totaling ~200 views on DEV Community, the author read the Forem open-source feed algorithm to understand why. The relevance score is a product of factors including age decay, discussion, author follow status, tag matches, and reactions — meaning one near-zero factor can tank visibility. The real lesson: the writing never got a fair test because there was no repeatable distribution process and no existing audience.

• •DEV Community's feed uses a multiplicative relevance score where one weak factor can sharply reduce visibility
• •Age decay is steep: 1.0 on publication day, 0.2 by day seven, 0.02 by day eight
• •Author follow status matters enormously: 1.0 for followers vs 0.01 for non-followers in the dominant feed variant
• •The honest takeaway is that without an existing audience or distribution process, content quality alone is not tested

Generated with AI, which can make mistakes.