Our Web Monetization Community has been steadily on the rise, and with more folks joining up, we thought it might be helpful to discuss a bit about how the user feed works in more detail.
When talking about the user feed, we generally mean the feed that appears on the homepage when clicking on the feed tab. That said, we also often include the other tabs — latest, week, month, etc. — when discussing how it functions.
Here's what the feed looks like:
For Readers
It's important to understand that this feed is generally tailored to you based upon your interests, i.e. what you're following! You can follow tags, users, and organizations by clicking the follow button found within in most articles. This will make whatever you're following more likely to show up in your feed.
You can further customize the "weight" of each tag you're following via your user dashboard. This is super helpful if you really want to follow something important like #announcements and potentially care less about something like #getstarted.
For Content Creators
Rule number one is just to do what you do naturally! Don't get caught up in trying to game the feed by mistagging your posts with popular tags or try and get views via clickbait titles. You'll make no friends doing this! 😅
That said, it is good to be aware of the most popular tags, so that you might be able to craft content that tailors to them. You can look at /tags to get a sense of the most popular tags.
Another notable tip is that if you don't set a custom cover image for your article, it will not appear in the top slot view of the feed. In order for a post to appear at the top of a feed, it must have a cover image set — this is even true of /latest.
A Bit of Mystery
Without revealing all of the details behind the way the feed works, we'll note that popularity and newness also factor into how likely you are to be recommended something in the main feed.
Similarly, if we think that something is conduct-breaking — see our Code of Conduct — too advertorial, or just a partial post that links to read content elsewhere, there is a good chance that we will act to reduce the visibility of the post. We only want to highlight the best content and will take liberty to manipulate a post to be less visible if it doesn't jive with our editorial standards. Speaking of, if you find a post that doesn't meet our standards, please report it here.
Wrapping Up
There's a bit of basic advice around the feed. Got questions, feel free to ask away!
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