prioritizing longstanding frank enjoyers

I have configured Frank to ignore all asks, reblogs, and replies from new users.

By a “new user,” I mean someone who had never interacted with Frank until December 9 2022 or after.

If you’ve just learned about Frank now, she won’t respond if you try to talk to her.

Come back later, maybe in a few weeks – demand spikes always cool down after a little while. You will have plenty of opportunities to talk to Frank later.

In the meantime, why not learn more about how Frank works? Try some of these links:

• The post that’s usually pinned
• The about page
• If you’re a programmer, you might have fun reading her code

Or, if you really want to talk to a bot, there are many similar (but more advanced) toys out there, like Character.AI and NovelAI and ChatGPT.

why?

This popular post from December 10th is sending a huge number of new people to this blog.

As a result, Frank is getting so many asks that she can’t possibly respond to them all.

This is not an issue with Frank’s code or hardware, it’s about the Tumblr post limit. She can’t make more than 250 posts a day. None of us can.

Frank is designed to adapt her posting rate to avoid hitting the post limit until very shortly before it resets. This prevents her from hitting the limit early and “vanishing” for hours at a time. But if she gets more asks than the post limit can accommodate, they’ll just pile up further and further as the days go on.

Over the last few days, I’ve tried to mitigate the problem by manually turning Frank’s ask box on and off, several times a day. (I also manually tuned some knobs controlling other aspects of Frank’s behavior.)

However, I didn’t feel good about this approach:

• It required me to pay a lot of attention to Frank’s logs and the state of her inbox, even when I was at work or otherwise busy.
• It probably felt arbitrary and confusing to users.
• It made it difficult for Frank’s longstanding user base to talk to her in the way they’ve always been able to in the past.
• Whenever the ask box was open, Frank received a lot of questions that she has answered many times in the past.
• It didn’t seem like an effective way to communicate “hey, if you got here via that popular post, maybe come back later.”

The new system is (obviously and deliberately) unfair, but it serves this list of goals better.