I used to be extremely discriminating in terms of whether or not I'd watch an artist, but throughout 2014-2016 I picked up the habit of clicking +Watch on all sorts of galleries I wasn't really all that deeply interested in, or was strongly interested in for the wrong reasons.

See one or two vore or macro pics I liked? I'd watch the gallery even if those were unusual commissions out of the hundreds the person drew.

See a nice tasteful picture of a lady furry I thought looked nice? Watch the gallery even when the artist continues uploading hundreds of samey ones of the same expression and pose time and again. Same deal with cute chibis when I was in the mood for cutesy.

Find an effectively dead account from five years ago that belongs to someone who used to make a lot of content I like? Watch in the hopes that he comes back and uploads more again.

See someone with an OC waifu or fursona similar to my girlfriend of the time? Watch, and imagine her by proxy on all the art of that character to come out.

Someone draws one of my favorite species, like a rat or a mink? Watch. Even if it's only once.

Someone I know/watch already commissions high-quality art of his character? I watch the artist, even if nobody else is commissioning him on a similar theme.

I kept coming back to FurAffinity after days or weeks away, buried in an inbox of thousands of drawings or dozens of identical-looking journals. I can only respond to so many raffles, so many streams, so many Happy New Years or Merry Christmases, so many "NEED HELP, SEND MONEY"s, et cetera.

Nuking the art was simply never an option for me. That completely undoes the whole point of watching artists in the first place! I needed to make sure I at least saw the thumbnails, and at a certain point it started being a chore to look through my art inbox rather than a pleasure. To delete dozens or hundreds of pictures I had no interest in, no more than one page at a time. I stopped or at least slowed down on my old style of going to the Browse tab and selecting species or themes I like - of which there are certainly a lot more than just macro/micro and vore!

So today I went and cleared out my subscriptions. I kept the following:
- Anyone I consider a friend.
- Anyone I know from another community, even if we don't interact much here (Pilli10 from YouTube Poop, notveryathletic from Talkhaus, Spazman from Slime Salad), or even much over there for that matter.
- Anyone I can remember having an engaging conversation with.
- Anyone who ever drew anything for me, whether commissioned, as a free raffle prize, as a request, or as a spontaneous gift.
- Anyone I drew anything for and happened to be watching. This is the reason for the strange flood of gift art in the last quarter of 2016, I've been thinking of doing this since early April or so.
- Anyone I was super double ultra sure I wanted to continue watching on this site due to style or content type.
- And one person who recently put out a journal being sad about losing watchers over reposting old art, which I for one loved seeing. It might not always show, but I do care about sparing peoples' feelings.

I went down from around 800 to less than 200, partly by deleting all deactivated or blanked accounts on principle.

I might re-watch some of these people some day, but if I do it's going to be for different reasons - the most likely is if we wind up becoming friends to some degree. Clearing out the cruft will make it easier for me to reach out in conversation.

Pretty soon I'm going to be adding new watches to my watchlist, as well. Going through those who are currently watching me and seeing what they're up to. Going through the artists who gave me stuff and didn't ask for a watch in return and seeing if I like what they've been putting out. Maybe even just checking some of my highly favorited art and seeing if there's anyone out there who likes some of what I do, but not enough to watch my page.

Happy 2017, everyone!