Upcoming changes to the discovery feed
The Bear community is awesome. The discovery feed is vibrant with slices of life, letter circles, the sharing of tips on how to trick out your blog, and so much more. It's a special corner of the internet that needs to be nourished and protected.
But as with any growing community, this hasn't been without its own set of challenges. These challenges can be broadly categorised into 2 groups:
1. Spam blogs
Fighting spam is an ongoing battle, but mostly a solved problem. A combination of The Frustration Loop and the review process has taken care of it. However, due to a sharp increase in the number of signups recently (both legitimate and spam blogs), I've co-opted the help of Pam and Shraddha from Bonsai Digital to get through the never-ending stack of new blogs.
2. Unsuitable content
The discovery feed is a place where people share their blog posts. It's also our town square. Due to the ranking algorithm (which I'm quite proud of) the content on the Trending feed tends to be great. I love reading the posts that bubble to the top.
Every now and then a toxic or hateful post finds its way to the homepage, but these are rare and quickly flagged and removed.
The Most recent feed, however, needs some work. I want to find a way to make the Most recent feed a fun place to explore. This will allow posts that are otherwise unseen to receive toasts and bubble to the top, even if a blog has no external reader-base. The problem is that there are a lot of low-quality posts on the Most recent feed, ranging from test posts, to tweet-style content, to placeholders for WIP content.
Solutions
Opt-in instead of opt-out
Potentially having all posts be opt-in instead of opt-out of showing on the discovery feed. Defaults matter a lot and by having posters explicitly decide to share a post with the community will (hopefully) improve the quality of the Most recent feed's submissions. This will mean that if you want your post to show up on the discovery feed you will need to add the make_discoverable: true attribute on each post. You can also add this attribute to your post template so that all of your posts are discoverable by default.
Filter by language
Currently there are many different languages on the Newest feed, but no way to filter by them. Over the next few weeks I'd like to play with an optional language filter. This will allow readers to filter by their chosen language, but also be able to remove the filter and see all posts regardless of language.
Qualifiers for joining the community
This is still a very rough thought: There is generally a direct correlation between the size of the community and how good it is. As a community grows too big it becomes like Reddit. And the internet doesn't need another Reddit. I don't have any concrete ideas on how to filter new community members outside of the existing opt-in review, but maybe there should be some other qualifier for new bloggers to join the discovery feed. Just food for thought.
A call for feedback
The discovery feed is a community hub and a shared space. And because of that, the community should be involved in the decisions made with it. I've created a thread for making additional suggestions and commenting on the proposed changes. Please get involved!
If you'd like to make a suggestion privately, you can pop me an email.