🔦 A new spotlight on Pagecord blogs

The most requested feature for Pagecord isn't actually a product feature. It's for a "Discover" page. For example, a customer writes:

[A discover page] makes a difference to the service, makes it feel more like a community

It's a great idea, but I've been a little resistant to it up until now because I didn't feel Pagecord had the critical mass of customers and, hence, fresh blog posts to do it justice.

I started playing around with an algorithm internally a couple of months ago and, thanks to a chunk of new customers (🙏), it now feels ready for people to try out with a beta caveat. Head on over to the new public Spotlight page to see for yourself.

The Trending page lists the top 20 "trending" pages, plus there's a Recent page that displays a selection of the most recent posts. There's also a handy link to the existing Shuffle feature which will redirect you to a random new blog post.

For now these lists only include pages set to an English locale (there's definitely not enough non-English posts to add a filter yet, sorry!), and they only show a given blog once regardless of whether a blog has multiple new or popular posts.

If you're interested, The trending algorithm is currently defined as:

score = (engagement × boost) - age_penalty
    
engagement = √views + (√(upvotes − 1) × 10) 
boost: 2× for brand new posts, decaying to 1× over 14 days
age_penalty: -0.1/day, so newer posts with equal engagement rank higher

I'm no data scientist so I'm sure this could be improved, but it seems to work well enough for now. I'd be interested in your thoughts.

This is one of those features that will get better over time, as new customers arrive and more posts appear each day. It's worth mentioning that there may be a downside to this sort of list: trending posts may get more views as a consequence of being on the list, so their popularity could compound unfairly. Time will tell.

Spotlight is live now, so go and take a look and see if you can discover an interesting new blog to follow!