Inspired by @pnorman’s animation, here’s a year of daily OpenStreetMap tile traffic. One frame per UTC day, from the start of September 2022 through end of August 2023. It’s from the public log aggregates, so some low-traffic tiles are left out for (I assume) efficiency and privacy.
The answers to your questions are:
1. Yacht and rally car races.
2. Yes, well noticed! We call it “Null Island”.
3. No, but it would be nice if it were practical.
4. People scraping tiles.
5. Yes, because the distribution of traffic follows Zipf’s law.
6. If I have time.
@vruba is "people scrapping tiles" the answer to the vertical or horizontal lines?
If so, what would then be the diagonal lines stemming from null island? Surely relocating something to its proper address or any similar operation would not trigger intermediate tiles, so I'm at a loss regarding what's happening there...
@tfardet I don’t know about the vertical and horizontal “diffraction spike” lines; I’m curious about those too. Scraping generally looks like rectangles and is far more visible in @pnorman’s hourly visualization. The Null Island radiants are, I’ve been told, relocations that improperly do a smooth pan instead of teleporting directly from Null Island to somewhere actually intended. So you’re right that they shouldn’t request intermediate tiles, but they do.
@vruba @tfardet The ones that move around are scraping. I'm not sure what the lines that don't move are.