Replying to Avatar corndalorian

Gm good sir šŸ˜‚šŸ«‚ I actually like the idea of the trending feeds in Primal (and similar feeds in other clients), and I have seen them get better over time as your team has tweaked them. I don’t even hate the idea of Buzzbot. I just don’t like stuff like Buzzbot on trending feeds because the ā€œengagementā€ that makes it show on Trending is manufactured and inauthentic. People are not engaging with the content because the content is good or interesting to them; they are only liking/reposting/etc. because it constitutes a contest entry. It just so happens that those same actions are what the Trending feeds look for to surface content. I imagine that may be intentional on the part of whoever makes these bots. Not the first time it’s happened. This time it appears more polished, I don’t think it’s any less spammy, and it feels at odds with the intended purpose of the Trending feeds.

One suggestion is to give activities like Buzzbot and other ā€œpaid engagementā€ posts a place to live SEPARATE FROM the Trending feeds. Maybe an ā€œEngagement Bot Feedā€ or a ā€œPaid Engagementā€ feed, where posts that contain certain keywords/phrases are filtered into, and leave Trending for the posts with more organic engagement.

Another suggestion is to apply a label to bot posts or posts engaging in ā€œpaid engagementā€ wherever they show up to alert users, similar to how ads are labeled on X.

Third suggestion is to give us a way to filter content out of our feeds by keywords, key phrases, and/or labels, to give more granular and personalized control to users.

Thanks, I appreciate the detailed reply. 🫔

> ā€œpaid engagementā€ posts a place to live SEPARATE FROM the Trending feeds

Sounds nice in theory, but the whole point of these engagement hacks is to show up in the main trending feed. They don't want a separate feed. They'll keep hacking until they make it to the main trending feed.

So my question still stands: how exactly do we identify good quality content? Our best approach so far is to measure engagement by real users (non-bots). I don't expect you to solve this for us, but ideas are welcome.

> label to bot posts or posts engaging in ā€œpaid engagementā€

Good idea, if we can reliably identify paid engagement.

> give us a way to filter content out of our feeds

Yes, we are getting ready to deploy a feature to help with this.

Thanks again, keep the feedback coming!

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Yea I was trying to give Buzzbot a little benefit of the doubt, but it absolutely is geared to hack the trending algos. The tweak you published today that mutes it based on user choice is great for making the trending feeds less noisy for those of us who want. Good move in my opinion. 🫔