#activity forensics

Nonsense posts, you have failed me :pensive:

In the middle of rarity we have the times when I see mutuals posting on nigh-opposite sides of a political debate. Like right now (EDIT: as of around 20 minutes ago, actually). These mutuals do not know each other. I will never introduce them. But I thought it was worth remarking on.

The most interesting part about this is that this is a debate that I’m not going to get into on my main blog, as it’s one of the only things that I try not to post about on my main. But in vague terms: as with most things, I’m a no-take-haver on this issue. I say “there’s nuance when you get into the particulars*” and hope that absolves me of having a take.

And you know, I always wonder how people find my older posts. If you click the header (the area around the OP/reblogger’s icon) an old post, then ones from just before it also show up, as if you’ve teleported through their dash to that date.

Sometimes my recently-reblogged older posts have a tag, so I imagine that whoever reblogged it just found a tagged post they were interested by and started trawling all of my posts with that same tag. But on occasion, they reblog an old post with *no* tags. I can only imagine they were trawling one of my tags and took a detour. Clicking one of the specific posts, then letting the same-time posts fill the screen to resume scrolling on (speaking of that, I need to tag all my posts so they’re easier to trawl through). Or maybe it just showed up in the For You page.

I've posted at least one other post about page-trawling, but I don't know if I'll find it, so I'm posting this separately. I think lurking/archive-trawling should be easy to privately do without getting any comments about it, especially since I lurk and trawl too, but it's (i.e. old-post reblogs) happened a few times recently and I guess I just wanted an excuse to remark about it.

But I can’t deny enjoying it. Instagram Reels has a few common terms, but my favorite at the moment is “[post] liking competitor.” Because in the bottom-left corner of Reels, if someone you follow has already seen and liked the reel you’re viewing, their profile picture shows up with a little heart. Since your algorithm is based on your follows, it’s pretty common to see the same “[person you follow] liked this” profile picture several times in a given scroll-session.

And they’ve made an implied competition out of it, that you should hit like on more videos, more often, so you can show up on on the bottom-left corner of THEIR feed proving that you saw the funny videos first.