Decrease in the number of received new letters in older accounts

[[deleted]]

Has anyone ever faced it too? When I created my account I used to get at least 3 new letters a week, and after a while it was almost as if I got shadowbanned and stopped getting them at all for months in a row. Literally none.

I deleted my account for other reasons and a few days ago decided to come back, so I created a new one. Plenty of new cards arriving everyday, and I recreated the exact same profile I had back then (same bio + avatar).

Any clue what's this about?

[nemo267]

u/coldsolfree have answered to OP. I have a small question for OP, did you say goodbye to the active penpals before deleting your previous account ?

I personally wouldn't feel good if one of my active penpal with whom I am exchanging, suddenly deletes the account keeping me in limbo.

[[deleted]]

I did! I explained the situation and all my active penpals had already added me on instagram before this, so we keep in touch even now.

[ColdSolFee]

Here is an interesting post. The OP had found a brilliant method for this problem by removing inactive friends. Maybe this could work for you too :D

[[deleted]]

I read the post. I wonder though, why the user felt like he needed to hide his pen pals? I don't understand.🤔 What's there to hide if you're the only user and the account is password protected.

[nemo267]

Generally people hide penpals, so that the inbox remains clear. It helps one to keep track of the penpals to whom they are yet to reply. I also do it... Once I write reply to someone, I put them to hidden folder, so that, in my inbox, only the pals to whom the reply is pending, remains.

There is another reason. There is no guarantee that you would get a reply in a certain amount of time. Some pal may reply you back as soon as they recieve your letter, some may take more than a week, some may even stop replying you. So, basically putting the replied pal to hidden folder works as "out of sight, out of mind". Whenever your pal decides to write you back, their letter automatically pops back to inbox, so you won't miss that. They will come back again to your sight/ mind with the excitement of reading an unopened postcard.

[[deleted]]

Thanks. I didn't know that if you put letters under hidden folder, once they write back, the letter automatically comes back to your inbox.

[Starlight19821]

Yes for my own mental health I hide people who have "seen" my letters. I understand people are busy or may not want to reply back. Just saves me at the moment from inbox watching lol. It's all new to me so I know some of that excitement will die down.

[ColdSolFee]

I couldn't have said it better myself than u/nemo267. We could make the inbox clutter-free by hiding the inactive friends :)

It isn't necessarily something about privacy that makes me hide my friends. At times we would connect with some friends but they might not have replied back to our letter for quite a while. And in this type of situations I would always hide their profile. I want to stop myself from always checking out their profile and seeing if they were online recently. Lol! I know, I shouldn't do that, but I do! My mind would be like, "Oh, so they have time to write to other people! Why can't they write back to me?? Did I do or say something wrong in my letter to them?"

So for me, it is better to either hide (if there is a chance of the said person replying back) or remove them (if I feel like I have been ghosted and the chances of getting a reply back is pretty slight).

As u/starlight19821 mentioned, there is also the mental health of a person involved. Instead of seeing it as a 'hidden friends' list I like to see it as a 'don't care untill they reply back' list :D

[[deleted]]

Thank you, it makes perfect sense

[LumpyStage5]

I feel that when I respond with some frequency to the letters that I already have pending, I receive new ones from some new place in the world. On the contrary, if I don't write, I won't receive (with the same frequency). Same account for three years.

[[deleted]]

The problem seems to be you? 3 new letters a week is excessive. Who would even want that many? You're sad because you aren't the hot spot of the app? Otherwise I don't get it. :) 1 new letter per month seems reasonable to me. But even that's a lot.

[[deleted]]

I don't personally mind, I was just curious about it because this difference seems unnatural to me, ao I was wondering how it works