How does the promotion of posts work on DEV?

I have just been having a conversation on a post about how DEV decides what content to promote, so I thought I would ask the question instead of speculating!

• What dictates what is promoted on social media?
• What dictates top comments in the newsletter / weekly post?
• What dictates a top 7 post in the newsletter / weekly post?

For clarity: I am talking about things that the DEV team actively promotes, not what is popular in the feeds or how the feeds work.

I know they say in the top 7s that it is based on traffic or engagement but that doesn't appear to be the case (although I can't see traffic figures to be fair).

They do seem very much human driven (which is fine but then I am asking how are they chosen)?

Just wondered how it all worked and what is actually looked at as the criteria?

Is there a bit of luck involved as to which posts the DEV team happen to read, as I understand you can't possibly read them all?

I am intrigued so I can learn how to game the system write better content that gets promoted 😉🤣

Personal motivation

This question was sparked as I released a monster article (one that I believe is truly great quality...for once I didn’t shit post 😜!) that got great engagement but low views. (currently: 224 reactions to 2500 views)

As an experiment I deliberately wrote a "low effort" post that I released at one of the worst possible times that was designed to be a click magnet / get noticed and....the "low effort" one got promoted! (currently: 55 reactions to 4400 views)

Not complaining about getting a shout out (thanks DEV) it just seems a bit broken that I can predict what is likely to get shared based on the tags and title rather than the quality of the post!

I know that increasing visibility of quality content is something the DEV team is working on, so perhaps a final question is how you find that quality content in the first place (suggestions are: "reactions to views" ratio seems like a decent starting place, maybe "number of comments to views" too?)?

Anyway just asking the question, and from a purely selfish standpoint (until people get sick of me promoting it!) here is the article I believe was "promotion worthy" and the one deliberately designed to get promoted!

the "high effort" post

the "low effort" post

Thanks in advance for any clarity on this!