I find them mostly useless at my level and I wish if we had percentage trend stats they covered a wider time/date range than a day. There's no way to change the trends on a day v day basis when you're below multiple thousands of subs other than like... updating very often, which really goes against Tapas' "best practice" guidelines of "make it long scroll format".
In games design, there's a phrase that is often repeated, "if you want players to play the fun way, you have to make the optimal way to play also be the most fun way to play" because game players will always choose the optimal way to play a game, even if it's incredibly un-fun grinding, slowly sneaking everywhere, using the same attack over and over, never switching characters etc. Tapas unfortunately has created a system that encourages frequent updates, and I don't think that was deliberate or nefarious. I think it was an accident caused by a desire to please everyone that perhaps needs thinking through more. They assume top creators want to track performance on a fairly minute basis, but performance on a day to day basis is very swingy below a few thousand subs. They wanted to make a system where small and new comics can get visibility through a good update day or a strong promo campaign and it's accidentally created a system where top comics are static and everyone else yo-yos wildly up and down the charts and the optimal solution is to update as frequently as you can by making your updates shorter.
The root problem here is that Tapas is trying to build a system that works for everyone, but their site is one where a minority of creators generate the vast majority of income and bring in most new consumers (consumers of course meaning users who aren't creators, they're just here to read. Only about 4k of Tapas users are also creators). So they have to balance the needs of a small number of creators whose works have tens of thousands (or more) reading and generate the ad and ink revenue that pays for all our hosting, with the needs of a large, vocal userbase of people on the forums whose works mostly cost more to host than they generate, but have strength in numbers enough to sway the discourse and public opinion about the platform.
If I could suggest something different it'd be to change the percentages to "this week" or "this month", change the baseline for comparison from the previous day/week/month to your average, or remove them. That said, it's entirely possible that the day-day subs are useful for creators with 10k subs, and I'd love to hear more of what they have to say on the subject, though I know creators with large followings sadly tend to steer clear of the forums due to some people with jealous and toxic attitudes. If it's useful for them and they're basically paying for our hosting... well, I'm okay with putting up with an unhelpful widget for that.
