OK, this is legit fascinating.
You can now see your 'reblog graph' and poke it to find out who is responsible for big surges in notes. It's in the notes dropdown with reblogs with comments etc.
I've always been curious about this, but it isn't always easy to tell, especially if the person with clout didn't add anything.
Like, I figured out early on that @copperbadge reblogging this post gave it a real boost:
Here we are at just 600 reblogs. But you'll note that the first significant boost came earlier, from @roachworks I just didn't know, because they didn't make a comment or add any tags.
It took much longer for me to work out that @thebibliosphere gave me a bigger boost soon after copperbadge - again, because they didn't add anything.
My next boosts come from a couple of writing blogs, @heywriters and @thewritershandbook:
And that about exhausts the main path. But when you get really deep in, looking at all the reblogs, you can see that there's a much bigger impact that happens in a whole bunch of clusters later on. Who is at the middle of this bright oblong? @dduane Another silent reblog I might never have known about!
Anyway, thanks to all the folks, large and small, who have boosted this post! While I'm glad they reversed the big change to how notes for reblogs are allocated, I actually think it's really neat to see who's had the big impact in getting successful posts under more eyes, and what the connections are. Over 12,000 reblogs and still only 32 reblogs deep to dduane. And yet that early boost from copperbadge was 20 reblogs deep already!
That said, the technology is obviously still working things out. The first post I poked this for was my biggest post on my main account (@rhube ) - the lolrus one - and for a post with over 100,000 notes this feature basically crashed almost immediately.
