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Gideon's avatar

I’d like to see a true discovery feature which I think would help to this end. A section/category dedicated to surfacing and highlighting only new accounts vs based on popularity of article or author. Popularity only comes with reach, which most new writers on the platform don’t have.

This can be paired with an option to subscribe to be notified (monthly email) of new writers (with x article contributions) giving existing stackers the ability to check out new people and their work. This approach effectively minimizes the algorithmic efforts because we are free to easily find and subscribe to new authors based on pure discovery. The algorithms can then work more effectively in terms of providing quality that resonates with the reader because discovery becomes more organic and heavily weighted / influenced by the reader vs algorithm.

Discovery and quality don’t need complicated algorithms. It just requires two separate feature lanes; new and unpopular vs not new and popular. Let the people be part of the process.

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Kevin McSpadden's avatar

Yeah unfortunately my best strategy so far is to be a "reply guy" and randomly comment in threads like this and hope it piques interest.

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Gideon's avatar

Unfortunately that is the chief strategy for most new writers. Discovery and quality is only hard because the job has been completely handed over to algorithms.

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Kevin McSpadden's avatar

Yeah that's why any marketing 101 strategy says "don't plan on going viral" because it's way too random.

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