Main Site User Favorites & Possible Manipulation for Views

[SummonTheElectorCounts]

Forgive the ignorance of a sweet summer child, but I've just become active again on FA for the first time in a decade, creating a new account and posting content to it. In the process I've noticed that some users who favorite my works don't have any content listed under 'Favorites' on their user page.

Is this because users can hide their favorites, or is it something more sinister like adding favorites so an artist gets a notification, follows that notification to the user page to get them views, and then removes the favorites? If it's the latter, is this a pretty common practice since we don't get notifications when favorites are removed?

I'm mostly just curious, but if this is just a tactic to get page views I confess I'm a little upset cause I took the bait.

 

[quoting_mungo]

Users can choose to hide their favorites, yes, either entirely or above a certain maturity filter threshold. If the notification is still in your inbox it will change if the favorite is removed, and if you view your own submissions I think you can still click the favorites number for a list of users who faved the submission. (I never use that function myself so I haven’t checked if it’s still there in the last couple of years, but I don’t see why it wouldn’t be.)

 

[SummonTheElectorCounts]

Users can choose to hide their favorites, yes, either entirely or above a certain maturity filter threshold. If the notification is still in your inbox it will change if the favorite is removed, and if you view your own submissions I think you can still click the favorites number for a list of users who faved the submission. (I never use that function myself so I haven’t checked if it’s still there in the last couple of years, but I don’t see why it wouldn’t be.)

That makes sense. I'd wondered if it were a user setting to hide them, and that explanation seems a lot more logical than someone manually removing the faves. Thank you!