I tried to explain to my dad why being an influencer on Tumblr is just Not A Thing and how anyone who tried that would either get no attention or be run off the site, which then descended into a conversation about the advertising situation on here, how Tumblr hates sponsorships, and how making money off your blog is really not a thing here. Sometimes people do commissions or have a Patreon but like. That's it. No sponsored content, no ads, any way the blogger could make money on it is if followers chose to give it to them. Then I had to explain the lack of algorithms and how posting on this site is not for marketability, it is very much brain to keyboard and probably one of the most authentic sites out there, which is why the culture of anonymity is beloved. Then I had to explain that if Tumblr introduced algorithms that promoted sponsored content or anything similar people would just. leave. We hate capitalism here. He doesn't seem to get it. He doesn't get how capitalism ruins the social media experience on most sites and this feels like one of the last ones that are a space for YOU, not corporations. Any connection here is because you sought it out rather than because it was shoved in your face. Small creators have a chance. Everyone is a small creator. We literally cannot see follower counts. THIS IS A GOOD THING.
He was also like "how do they make money" and then I described to him how Tumblr had been losing money hand over fist for a while now and how we all loved this and made memes about it. Also, I had to explain AGAIN that Tumblr users are notoriously difficult to advertise to, and any attempt to figure out how to market to us turns out looking like an insane shitpost that sells nothing. *frog with a knife* "Are you aware of this? You shouldn't be."
Being one of the Lucky Duckies that got inside of Adam’s Love Regenerator IG account, I’ve been paying attention to his follower count since the day after it went Public on 25 January. On the 26th, I posted about how unreal it was that w/ 10.2 million followers on his Calvin Harris acct only 1,891 were following the LR acct. The next morning there were only 63 new followers then 249 more for a total of 2,203 before he slammed the door & took the acct Private again. Then the next day, 133 were admitted for a total 2,351 by the end of the 28th.
Here, I’m going to insert some speculation: I don’t believe Adam personally authorized my admission. I think going Public must have automatically approved everyone who had previously hit the Request button. During the time the account was Public, 312 people followed in the usual way & got to stay when it went Private again. But after that, Adam had to accept Requests manually & the numbers dropped radically. Yesterday, he added 50. Today 53 were added for a total of 2,439, as of 2pm US ET. That number will go up by the end of the day. But I’ve also seen the count go down by 1-to-3 before going back up again!
Therefore, I conclude after returning to Private, Adam has been screening the followers he allows on the LR account. He has blocked a few but added dozens more. The low daily numbers may show how little time he is devoting to his new acct. He has only added 1 new post since the 28th. I hope that’s because he’s busy getting LR-2 ready for release. If that’s the case, some of you are going to be waiting in line for a long time.
Another interpretation is: He’s only getting an average of 30 new Requests per day. Is that even possible? It’s hard to believe so few of Calvin Harris’ followers want to get into his LR account. That can’t be it. He must be screening the followers he got & those he’s adding now.
All of this leaves one major question unanswered:
What is the purpose of having a Private LR account?
It’s useless for promotion. Does he want to eliminate any potential negativity being attached to his new alias? Is he watching how many times we view a post to determine which samples are the most appealing? I dunno. A.U.W.W.A.S.
ETA: By golly, I forgot the most likely reason the LR acct might not be getting more than 30 Requests per day! The followers of his Calvin Harris acct might not know the LR acct exists! Seriously. He has only promoted it w/ tags! And there haven’t been any references to it on the usual music sites. If you’re not the kind of person who always clicks on the tag icon, you could be entirely clueless. Heck, if MACB hadn’t told me about it, I might not have noticed. Then when I saw it was Private, I tried to follow anyway & hit the magic Request button. Others didn’t & maybe didn’t even check back to see if it had gone “live” because they expected an announcement.
That means he might not be screening the followers!
Aaaaaaa no seriously, wheeeere? *squints eyes* I guess this means I need to interact with y’all more. Or something. Tis a quiet blog here I admit. I want to do something to celebrate but what? 🤔 Prompts are already, and pretty much always open at the moment so hmmmmmm
-talk about myself?
-talk suggestions for some multichapter fics (Sanders Sides only in this case)
-share exerpts of some WIPS?
IDK, I could be shouting to the void for all I know XD Be lemme know?
I hate the Tumblr follower count bug. It drives me nuts. It’s been around for over 2 years, and they have never made any effort to fix it. Seriously. They’ve already gotten really good at only displaying unique entries, even when it screws up how many followers are on a page. For example, today I was looking through my followers manually after blocking a porn blog that liked something I reblogged (it happens a lot. I have no idea how they find me. Some of them start following me, which is followed almost immediately be me blocking them).
(Long rant under the cut.)
On the first page, it lists 14 followers. Okay, strange number, but fine. Second page lists 12. Uh. Then on the third page there is one person. That’s it. Why was that last person not on the second page? Also, my “follower count” (the number beside “followers”) is 81. I only have 27 followers that I can count on my page. The page discrepancy is creepy because I have read that the follower pages should have 40 listings each. When I look at my pages, they only display unique entries. So I have 26 ghost followers on the first page, and 28 on the second. 44 ghost followers. That last page only has the first person who ever followed me (@mechromage, she introduced me to Tumblr, we met at computer science summer camp).
Like, I can understand some discrepancies when the blog in question has a lot of followers. But the problem is that Tumblr believes that I have three times as many followers as I actually do. I have 100% more ghost followers than I do actual ones. This freaks me out. See, when I block someone, the counter usually goes back down, and because I usually catch whoever it is the same day they follow me, the new follower count goes back down too.
I have ranted about this before. Many of the posts I can find about this same issue either have very few notes, or were created by blogs that have since deactivated.
This problem has existed since at least 2012, before Yahoo even bought Tumblr. This stupid bug has been around for 6 years, since before I even started using the platform. And yet with all the new features @staff have decided to roll out, this bug has never seemed to get fixed. The only way you can get a completely accurate follower count is through the Tumblr API, by counting unique entries, or by manually scrolling through your follower list and counting each one individually.
This post (whose original author has since deactivated) shows how this may have happened: caching. But fixing the followers page would literally fix everything else. Logically, I should only have one page of followers. Instead I have 3. And this part should be easy! Tumblr already doesn’t display duplicate and deactivated followers. There should be something that goes in and deletes all of the entries that don’t show up on your followers page, and then rearranges the pages so that 40 followers show up on each page. Then, if your “follower count” is the total number of entries (I assume this is stored in something like a vector, where one of the data members is the number of entries, which would get updated whenever one is added or removed), that issue would be fixed too.
The algorithm wouldn’t be that complicated either. I can literally write it right now.
Here is the actual function you would use to remove duplicates, in C++:
void RemoveDuplicateFollowers(int page, int displayedEntries, int removed) {
// entries = vector of followers
int offset = 40;
int start = offset * (page - 1);
int i = start;
int end;
if (start + offset > entries.size())
end = entries.size() - start;
else
end = offset;
int duplicates = offset - displayedEntries - removed;
while (i != end && duplicates != 0) {
int j = i;
while (j != end) {
if (entries.at(i) == entries.at(j)) {
entries.erase(j);
end = end - 1;
duplicates = duplicates - 1;
}
else
j++;
}
}
}
(That took maybe 10 minutes to write.) It runs in O(n^2) time. Actual run time would depend on number of duplicates, and where in the list the duplicates are located.
This would be contained within another function that checks the number of unique entries on the page, and would be preceded by a function that gets rid of deactivated blog entries (that returns the number of entries deleted). Like seriously. Not that fucking complicated. (Undefined variables and functions used are pretty self-explanatory.)
There is literally no reason that this is still a problem. That’s why I am so fucking angry about it.
Look at my easy solution, @staff. Apply it to the fucking situation, in whatever language you use to run this hell site that you got me addicted to.
