For You feeds have become an industry standard across the entire Web2 social media space. They allow Web2 platforms to feed you content that they believe you will be most interested in.
They have also been the source of a lot of skepticism. Namely, surrounding the collection and distribution (possible selling) of user data.
LEO has long-wanted to implement a For You algorithm. Some base technologies were required to be in place to make this possible - especially for the Threads protocol.
We announced several months ago that we were designing and simplifying a For You algorithm that would gather data and feed you better content on Hive.
The time has come. That For You algorithm is now ready for prime time.
First, we will release it for Threads and second, we will release it for blog Posts.
In what will likely become a standard for feeds on Hive, we are introducing the first-ever For You feed on the Hive blockchain.
Opposing Web2
The contrast of our For You algorithm as compared to the algos that are popular on Web2 is that:
- it is not closed-source
- it does not scrape private data
- it does not share private data
To have a For You algo, you need user data. The cool thing about Web3 is that we have an immense quantity of user data available...
And no, we don't need to scrape your browser or track your device like other Web2 platforms.
Instead, our For You algorithm relies ENTIRELY on data gathered directly on the Hive blockchain.
Our Vision for Hive
We believe Hive is the ultimate database. It allows us to seamlessly write and retrieve tens of thousands of pieces of data on a daily basis.
This data can be looked at as the "Hive Database". Hive's blockchain stores all of this content, user data and user interactions.
Our vision for Hive is that it is the ultimate, end-all-be-all for data storage and retrieval. We use it in this manner to operate Threads and the entire LEO ecosystem.
This is why our "For You" algorithm is so exciting to us. It leverages solely the data that can be retrieved from Hive. We are leveraging data that you are freely sharing on an open-source, publicly accessible blockchain.
Rather than take data without your permission and feed you content based off of it, we are scraping data about your Hive account from the Hive blockchain and then feeding you content from that data.
This means that you're not sharing a single piece of data with us that you are not sharing with Hive. We interact with the Hive blockchain, our algo reads the data and then the UI spits out a feed For You to enjoy.
Building Blocks of For You
Just as it became an industry standard on Web2, we believe this will become an industry standard on Hive.
Below we will paste the basic building blocks of the For You algorithm we've designed.
The weighting of each block is something we are tweaking right now and will continue to tweak as we see the algo perform in the real world.
The algo will be released on Labs tomorrow for anyone to test out on Threads. We'll then move it to production relatively swiftly so our systems can learn how to better feed you content.
We're also open-sourcing the entire algorithm so that any app on Hive can start implementing their own For You algo's. We believe this will become standard.
50% of following feed & 50% of non-following feed
50% Weighted Following Feed
- Authors You Follow - Threads created by an author you follow and has 1 comment and 1 vote
- Reply Authors - Show Threads from any Authors who have replied to you or you replied to author in the past 12 hours
- For example - if I replied to one of @taskmaster4450le's Threads yesterday and then go to my For You feed today, some of his recent Threads show up in my For You
- Tagged
- Show threads where the logged-in user was tagged
- Reply Threads
- Author is in follow feed AND thread has more than 3 votes or more than 3 comments
50% Weighted Non-Following Feed
- Trending tags
- Pull top 3 Threads in the past 12 hours from each of the top 5 trending hashtags
- For example, #gosh, #sportsnews, #hive, #gmfrens, #threadstorm are trending. Pull the top 3 threads from each of these and mix them into the For You feed
- Pull top 3 Threads in the past 12 hours from each of the top 5 trending hashtags
- Trending Threads
- Pull the top 10 trending Threads (regardless of hashtag) based on number of replies and mix them into the For You Feed
- Most-engaged authors
- Pull 10 threads from the 10 most-engaged-with authors in the last 24 hours (for example, if taskmaster received 50 replies, I received 30 replies, Eric received 25 replies, then show some threads from us in the feed)
- News2Threads
- There are several news2threads AI accounts like this one (https://labs.leofinance.io/profile/cryptoinsights) which post Threads with high-quality news and burn their rewards. Mix in threads from these accounts because they are high-quality news for the User based on interests
- Top 5 most viewed threads in the past 12 hours
- Take the top 5 most viewed threads (using our LeoAds View Counter API) and mix them into the feed
As I said, these are the basic building blocks. There are some more elements - namely, the weighting system for each block - that are not in the above list.
We're hoping other UIs adopt similar building blocks to build their own AI-driven, self-learning feeds for content on Hive!
Try it Out Tomorrow
This will go live tomorrow on https://labs.leofinance.io! Feel free to head over there and give it a shot!
Remember: it will learn and get tweaked heavily after being released. The initial version will be far from perfect, but we believe it will be immediately superior to the status quo that has been Hive content feeds for so many years!