Interesting. Was all of this traffic from one viral pin? Pinterest definitely likes frustrating people like that, giving you a taste of traffic and then stopping it to make you use their ads. I don't see another good explanation. Randomly, certain profiles are assigned a priority in the feed, while others experience less traffic and then it reverses and fluctuates.
From their point of view, the number of slots to show pins at any point is limited. They can fill it with only the top pins, but then all the new users won't get results and will leave. They can steadily divide the slots between all users, but then you don't have any natural selection happening. Making things fluctuate and oscillate solves both problems and as a bonus frustrates spammers and makes them leave on top of motivating people to start using their ads to get steady results. It also makes the algorithm impossible to pinpoint and exploit, be it by AI or humans.
Seems like the only solution is to keep steadily pinning a ton, thinking long term and not concerning yourself with the day-to-day (let alone hour-to-hour) fluctuations, which is the case with most platforms, especially google seo, which introduced some sort of 'random fluctuation frustrating thingy' in the algorhitm like back in 2010. Short-term thinking in IM will make you lose your sanity, that's a fact.
Although I am wondering if there are distribution priorities given to new, fresh accounts...
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