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Vanishing Watcher Mystery
5 months ago
Hi there! Maybe you are capable of solving this mystery? 🕵️
It's not something that's a major issue for me, but something I've noticed and I'm curious of the cause.
I'm not usually glued to my statistics, but for the past week I've been waiting to get over the watcher count treshhold of 7420. I've noticed I'm one person away from this number and wanted to have a little, slightly perfectionistic spike of joy seeing it even out x'D
And I've been waiting, and waiting, and each time I hit 7420, a couple of hours later I went down to 7419, then hit 20 anew, then back to 19 and so on and so forth. At least I got lots of joy 🤣
I've checked and I got 22 new watchers in this timespan (welcome on board, you lovely pervs <3). This fluctuation was constant and I always got equal amount of unwatches and watches.
I would assume it being caused by people just simply unwatching me, but it's not the typical unwatching pattern. I've seen some minor exoduses in the past and they had two distinctive features:
✧ They were after I posted some more edgy arts, which understandably don't fit everyone's fancy and I'm not surprised some people prefered to avoid seeing such stuff,
✧ They were spontaineous, and usually consisting of a bigger group of people unwatching within a couple days after posting, rather than systhematic un-trickle.
But never before have I been losing such amounts of watches while not posting anything controversial, while maintaining rather steady posting schedule (no bigger breaks or hiatuses).
Does any of you have any idea what's the cause? Is it FA fighting off some bots, or what's going on? xD
It's not something that's a major issue for me, but something I've noticed and I'm curious of the cause.
I'm not usually glued to my statistics, but for the past week I've been waiting to get over the watcher count treshhold of 7420. I've noticed I'm one person away from this number and wanted to have a little, slightly perfectionistic spike of joy seeing it even out x'D
And I've been waiting, and waiting, and each time I hit 7420, a couple of hours later I went down to 7419, then hit 20 anew, then back to 19 and so on and so forth. At least I got lots of joy 🤣
I've checked and I got 22 new watchers in this timespan (welcome on board, you lovely pervs <3). This fluctuation was constant and I always got equal amount of unwatches and watches.
I would assume it being caused by people just simply unwatching me, but it's not the typical unwatching pattern. I've seen some minor exoduses in the past and they had two distinctive features:
✧ They were after I posted some more edgy arts, which understandably don't fit everyone's fancy and I'm not surprised some people prefered to avoid seeing such stuff,
✧ They were spontaineous, and usually consisting of a bigger group of people unwatching within a couple days after posting, rather than systhematic un-trickle.
But never before have I been losing such amounts of watches while not posting anything controversial, while maintaining rather steady posting schedule (no bigger breaks or hiatuses).
Does any of you have any idea what's the cause? Is it FA fighting off some bots, or what's going on? xD
Ditto for some are folks stripping down their watch lists for any number of reasons.
I do know that some folks watch just to get page views or a watchback. Can't say I understand the reason, but it's a thing. Some of these folks unwatch after getting a reply or not getting one after a while. Might account for some.
I've seen more notices than I'm used to about leaving FA/the fandom because of getting hated on.
Agreed some are no doubt bots that are caught and removed.
A bug in the database or code.
I expect it's some combination of the above, plus anything I'm not thinking of.
And it made me think of one more thing that can cause it: I sometimes come across an artist I didn't remember I watched, click the 'watch' button, while not noticing it's a '-watch' now, then I come across them again and I'm like huuuuh? Didn't I watch them? o_O'''' I caught myself doing that only a month ago. I can only fathom how many artists whom I wanted to follow I've unwatched accidentally :X
I'm one of those crazy people that have never deleted anything in my message center since I started the account.
132466S, 6270C, 15226J, 119232F, 7213W
Currently have 6645 watchers, so, lost about 600 watchers over... 17 years? Which is not awful I suppose.
And yes, naturally I do understand that people can unwatch artists and I'm not bothered by that. I was just puzzled by the steadyness of the phenomenon. And I personally don't remember it occuring in this form in the early years, when I was starting and I would refresh my page several times a day to check if there are any new followers x'D so the relative novelty of it also caught my attention.