Show publication follower counts

[ajs1998]

I would love to be able to quickly distinguish between beloved/rising publications vs someone's rants into the void on the Discover page. I hate to judge a book by its cover, but it'll always be useful to know what might be more worth reading.

I think this would be a good first step towards a trending page.

It's hard to go to leaflet every day when I can't count on the newest leaflets to be anything special. And I think people are less likely to post there if they're not going to get discovered. More writers will come if the readers can explore.

[bschlagel]

Thanks! Have you tried 'Popular' on Discover? Or want something between newest / most popular, like 'new-ish but higher signal' basically?

I'm not really into showing follower counts tbh (or if we do, would want it to be opt-in which makes it less generally useful). And I think rn there's probably some correlation between follower count and interestingness…but as someone who at least skims just about every pub I think I'd miss a ton of good stuff that's new and not yet widely followed.

That said def agree we can improve Discover, I think we'll try some more experiments here!

One simple thing we can do is a 'posts' view on Discover — should help a lot to have post title/description I think, as far as quick context for whether you may want to read something. And make it a lot easier to filter out the 'first post' or 'testing leaflet' posts which don't add anything.

I think something like trending would be interesting too, and maybe things like 'popular within my social graph', though we're probably not quite at the scale yet where we can have that be really good!

[ajs1998]

Coming from someone that uses lots of social apps, I think I'm just used to numbers being everywhere and I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing. The big platforms would be nothing without something resembling an "algorithm".

Serious creators will invest time on platforms that have some public metric for what counts as "good" content, and it just seems improbable to get discovered on Recently Updated or Popular. Even something like GitHub's trending page might be nice, like the hottest 20 pubs updated weekly.

I love leaflet and the format, and I want it to run with the big dogs.

[bschlagel]

Makes sense @ajs1998, appreciate the thoughts here. I think there are a few ways we could approach this, from explicit numbers to some kind of "trending" algorithm to more curated (like Vimeo "staff picks" or Kickstarter "projects we love" sort of thing).

You're right probably not a ton of folks getting discovered yet on our Discover page; I expect most are finding things via Bluesky (creators' own existing networks). And we're pretty new so absolute numbers of follows etc are still relatively low across the board. Definitely something we'll keep an eye on / iterate with some more experiments. Also things we could add (e.g. likes/reactions for posts or comments) that'd be useful as an additional signal for future "trending" or similar.