Stumbled here from a Google search. My community is growing quite fast and I can see the “news feed” problem arising from a distance.
What if there was a way for the platform to use relationships instead of content to decide what to show first?
For example, if John reads all posts from Mary, has chatted with Mary and has liked several of her posts, then clearly John tend to prefer content from Mary.
What I’m proposing here is to build a “friendship score” for each user.
If the friendship score is above a certain treshold, the post shows on top. If not, then it show the post chronologically.
The Facebook algorithm has 4 big factors: the person who post and the relationship with that person, the popularity/engagement of the content, the type of content and the users preference toward content type, time decay.
I’m sure this is insanely more complex than what I’ve just written out, but a really dumbed down version using only two of these factors (relationship + time) could be a huge step forward for Discourse.
I know it’s been a year, but I’m curious to see if anyone has any other/simpler ideas.