#askdfhakjshsa

[theladyyavilee]

I see loads of the blogs I follow say they check their followers and block inactive ones and im like... my blog may appear inactive but thats because I like things with my main to reblog on my second blog later when I have time, and I stopped posting to my main in 2020. I'm always worried I'm gonna get blocked. Can I genuinely ask why people block blogs that look like bots/are bots? Half my followers were bots at one point and it was annoying getting the notifications but ultimately I ignored it and nothing bad happened. It seems like a lot of effort for no reason I guess, but I've always been a more casual user anyway so maybe I'm missing something.

hmmmm I don't think there is an easy answer to this and I think it probably greatly varies for people, so I can only give you my own reasoning!! (also edit from after finishing: whenever I sound a little angry here I promise it is not @you anon, your question is super valid and I hope I could answer it sufficiently, I just get a little pissed about the low engagement in fandom!)

to my knowledge you are correct, there is no active harm that comes to you, the blogger from having bot followers! but the thing is these bots use the connection to your blog, which they create by interacting, to create a false impression of being 'real' accounts and therefore creating 'real' traffic for various porn and/or ad-heavy sites from my understanding (which I have to admit is limited) and maybe that doesn't hurt me, but I personally also do not enjoy the thought of it, so I block them! (also there is that thing where if we just let them do it and someone profits from it, there is a good chance it will increase and I imagine this could have gotten A LOT worse over the years if most people DIDN'T block!) another thing is that for a while there the spam-liking from bots was pretty intense to the point where I had posts where 60-70% of the notes were likes by bots and that was just extremely disheartening on a website where you are hoping for actual, real interaction so that was when I started to really diligently block all of them, even the ones that weren't following me, because they were genuinely drowning out everything else!! and then of course there were the bots that would reblog popular posts or personal posts and add links to it, which was also extremely annoying, so yeah, for bots my general rule has been to always block them when I notice them, because it just makes your life easier and also hopefully decreases the value of creating them!

now inactive blogs are a different topic! when I say inactive blogs I mean ones that NEVER WERE active (so if you were active before on your main, just aren't anymore these days, at least to me you are absolutely fine, and I assume to most other people as well, because if you have mutiple posts that actively show you were engaging with something, I will always assume that is a real person and leave it alone and also most people nowadays are aware of the whole main-blog/side-blogs thing!! so I think you don't have to worry too much about that, but if you are really worried, you could always pop a note about it being a semi-inactive main-blog into your header to be 100% safe ❤️❤️) the thing with completely inactive/empty blogs is that there has been an influx of them, especially ones that will only interact by liking posts, and I think a lot of people have already pointed this out, but LIKES DON'T DO ANYTHING FOR VISIBILITY ON TUMBLR, they are a little nod at the person who made the post and that's it and with how interaction especially on content posts in fandoms has severely decreased and if nobody reblogs our posts NOBODY WILL SEE THEM, it is just extremely annoying to see people who will only like posts! and if you have reblogged posts on your dash, just not mine, because maybe you don't like mine enough, then whatever, do you, that is fine to me, everyone has the right to reblog only what they want to, but if you just on principle never reblog anything, then I don't actually wan't you to be able to follow me and get easy access to my content, because you are making fandom worse by skewing interactions even further to likes instead of reblogs! and then I will absolutely block, because the low reblog-rates are REALLY FRUSTRATING for content creators!

quick sidenote for whoever may read this: REBLOG CONTENT YOU ENJOY OR CONTENT CREATORS WILL STOP CREATING IT FOR YOU, I can promise that is not an empty threat, that is a reality, because it is so so so fucking disheartening!

(in the overlap between these two categories exist A LOT of blogs that are a lot harder to judge, because from my experience a lof of pornbots would also variously just reblog popular posts with no rhyme or reason and then there were also the ones that would have like three reblogged posts, where one was like a super popular meme post, one someone's random fanfic and one a random personal post from someone with 2 notes, which to me for some reason was always really unsettling, but also makes it harder to distinguish between bots and people who are only sporadically reblogging random things 😬 and whether or not I block those depends kinda on what mood I am in 😅)