After I uploaded my GrannySmithOS shell, I noticed that I could only see how many downloads my program has gotten since it was uploaded. So in order to see the rate at which my program is being downloaded, I've actually had to monitor each day how many downloads I got. Many other programmers have also said (in discord) that they do the same thing to be able to see whether people are gaining interest in the program.

I think that it is crucial for uploaders to see the rate at which their programs are being downloaded not only so that they can time releases more precisely but also so that they can see how much people are enjoying using the program. For comparison, there is the time line of how many posts a user has made over time; so I think that there should be a time line that will show the uploader how many uploads their file has gotten over time.

I doubt any of this information was tracked.

When I saw the title, I thought it meant how long it took for the program download to reach a user's computer.

It is. If you click on your name above "Go to the new posts", you should be able to see a graph of the number of posts you've made versus time.

No, lol! That wouldn't really be helpful data to have.

Unfortunately, we don't store that information, so we wouldn't be able to go back and determine the actual downloads per day. Best we (and you) can do is divide the number of downloads by the number of days the program has been in the archives, unfortunately. I remember back in the day I really wished ticalc.org had this particular feature, when I checked my stats and my top programs' stats daily.

Mateo was responding to the snippet of yours I left in the quotes.

We only have a graph of the forum posts because each post is stored in the database with the timestamp. Easy to pull posts by user ID and graph out the posts they make.

Downloads aren't recorded in the database so there's no way to track them.

I'm assuming you don't want to add revise the database/code to be able to store this kind of stuff. right?

It wouldn't be very difficult to add a table to log download history for files, but doing so might be fairly costly.

The simplest version of this would have a table referring to a file with a timestamp, which we insert a row into for each download. This obviously becomes costly to store since we need a row per download.
Slightly cleverer would be to accumulate counts per-file per-day by truncating timestamps to date only and also storing a count, incrementing the count (or initializing to 1 if not yet present) on each download.

I wouldn't want to do the former, but the latter might be okay- I'm a little wary of the cost of read-modify-write transactions in that case, but it's probably fine: the scale at which this needs to run is actually very modest.