Every social media or microblogging platform has to be as transparent as possible about its content delivery mechanisms. Today, we take a small first step in giving our users a brief on how content delivery at Indiefact works.
First Principles
Giving voice to regular people
Most platforms today are biased towards influencers, celebrities, and politicians. These individuals can gather a large following because of their public status, leaving most people to try and acquire followers. It leaves out most people from the digital public square and excludes them from public conversations. We intend to change that. Our vision is to give a voice to the common person by creating an equal opportunity platform.
No following
Most platforms today rely on users following each other as one of the primary mechanisms to deliver content. Indiefact deviates from this behavior from most other platforms by design. When users have to “follow” other users, it leads to a few undesirable outcomes:
- Few people gather large followers and dictate public discourse.
- Content creators are more focused on acquiring followers rather than creating content.
Indiefact does not rely on following as the primary way to deliver content. On Indiefact, content is distributed based on topics and how you engage with your audience.
Gamification Model
Games, especially RPGs are very good at assessing character growth based on in-game actions. We’ve used this strategy to assess a user’s development and contributions, qualitatively and quantitatively. You may notice that you get XP every time you do an action on Indiefact; this helps the system assess the number of your contributions. We also measure the quality of contributions depending on how you engage with people. The result is that every user has their path for growth and development on the platform based on their activities and engagement, much like a simple RPG game.
The Algorithm (v 1.0)
We’ve captured all the first principles into our content distribution algorithm. The current version of the algorithm distributes content based purely on a quantitative assessment of your contributions. This algorithm is built for a small data set of users and posts. As data sets become large, content distribution will be based on qualitative and quantitative factors.
XP
Every time you do an action on Indiefact you earn XP, or experience points. This gives our system and other user an idea of the quantity of the contributions you have made on the platform. Simply put, the more XP you have the more contributions you have made. Following is the XP you acquire per action
Create an Account +50XP Create a community +50XP Create a post +10XP Create a repost +5XP Create a comment +5XP Give a reaction +3XP Receive a repost +5XP Receive a comment +5XP Receive a reaction +3XP Successfully report abuse +10 XP Post take down for abuse -50XP Post View +1XP
Feeds
The Indiefact app currently has two primary feeds:
Home
The home feed is where all the recent posts are populated. When a post is created it will land upon another person’s feed so long as they have subscribed to the same topic as the post in a pseudo-random order.
Trending
The trending feed is where the most engaging posts of the week show up in order of engagement. Every post has an engagement score and as users react to your post, your engagement score increases. If your post has a high engagement score for the week, it will show up in trending.
Tips for users
- Have a bio. Users want to see what you’re into
- Have a profile picture. Having a profile picture increases your chances of engagement.
- Time your posts. Timing is an important factor in creating posts on Indiefact. Since most posts get visibility in the home feed first, it’s important to time your post correctly.
- Add text to your posts. Adding some context or text to your post increases your chances of engaging with people. Even if you are sharing links to your blog, summarize what you want to say in the post text.
That’s it for now! In an effort to be transparent, we will continuously update you, the user as we expand on our content distribution algorithms, (which we will).
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