some controversy surrounding the recent #hq blog post regarding the new 5,000 user +watch limit.
First off, for clarifications sake, Yes, this limit also includes groups you are watching. Secondly, you may only be able to +watch 5,000 deviants, but you can in turn be +watched by as many deviants as there are on the site. Thirdly, there are really only a handful of deviants (out of hundreds of millions) that watch more than 5,000 deviants. It's more than likely this change won't even affect you.
That said… let's do a bit of math. I know, I know… "grumble, grumble, math sucks". But trust me, it puts this into perspective a bit.
Let's go with the edge case and say that you happen to be watching 5,000 deviants. Let's also say that these deviants post 1 - 2 messages to your message centre a day for a week. That's fairly generous, right? I mean there are some groups that I watch that post about 50+ deviations alone per day. So I'll spread that figure across for all users and just say an average of 2 messages in total, including deviations, watches, comments, favs, journals, etc.
Which means…
Can you imagine having to check Seventy Thousand messages a week? I'm sorry, but unless checking your message centre is a full time, paying job it's just not possible. There is no way you can possible view, let alone respond, to that many messages in a given week. And that's just for messages you receive notifications on. This doesn't even count towards things like birthday notices.
Regardless of this point, you have to believe that we're doing this for your benefit. This limit reduces message centre bugs and puts in place a new framework for our developers to work off of in order to provide new features to these areas. You want new message centre upgrades? You want your friends list to display correctly and in a way that is beneficial to actually managing it? You want less bugs over all? I obviously can't go into much detail about future features but please know that this limitation span more than just what meets the eye. Updates and fixes are coming.
I've been on deviantART coming on 10 years and I watch less than 1,000 deviants/groups. Quite a number of which are now inactive, deactivated, or banned. I know this isn't how it is for all deviants, but seriously , it is worth it to watch thousands of deviants when you only end up mass clearing your message centre? Isn't the point of our community to nurture and tend to each other in the hopes of becoming better artists ourselves? How can we possible do that if we don't even bother or don't have the time to pay attention to our watched content?