Here’s a strange little factoid that probably gives a little hint to the underlying mechanics of the tumblr game.
Since I started reblogging My Broken Strangetown, my follower count on the main blog has gone down a little bit - couple of followers - nothing that can’t be discounted as normal bot attrition. I presume, since I’m not checking this in any fine-grained way, that in any given period of time I get a small number of real new followers and a small number of bots, and that while the bots fade away according to some mechanized schedule, enough real followers retain their blogs and don’t unfollow me that over the long term my gradual net gains are accounted for without my having to do anything but post and reblog what I want to.
My Broken Strangetown, however, has suddenly added about 40 followers, most of which (well over half) appear to be actual simblrs. By the standards I’m used to, this is an astronomical leap, and it cannot be explained by a surge in bot traffic.
Now, nobody but me is reblogging these. Reblogging’s not getting it seen by that many more eyes and all the eyes seeing it will continue to see it on my main page as long as I keep reblogging it. If you already follow my main page, there is presently no need to follow the sideblog. I haven’t compared the lists, but my assumption is that these are mostly new people who don’t know me through the main blog.
So does this mean that single reblogs of multiple posts is enough for the algorithms to bring a blog to the attention of of similar blogs? Is it enough to bump something up in a single tag (which, since I’m not tagging anything “Strangetown” or “Sims 2,” I can’t guess what it would be) so that it is more visible? Somehow? I mean, the notes on each post are still negligible in the larger world of influencers and popular bloggers and whatnot.
Anyway I feel like there’s some subtle effect at work here. I’m talking “subtle” like the training mechanism in Sims 2, that you have to spend hours playing to recognize. And I don’t play quite enough to suss it out.










