We just unveiled the Prōpa discovery algorithm, which ranks the plants shown when you go to the initial search page. Previously, this was simply the most recently updated plants in Prōpa, which did a bad job of showing the best pictures from a variety of users.
Our new algorithm is designed to show you the freshest and highest quality content on our platform. Here are the factors that we weight heavily when ranking content.
Post Recency
Who wants to see the same old plant every time they pull up Prōpa? No one!
We want to it to be easy for new users to get followers and for new posts to get likes, so new and recently updated content is favored by our algorithm. You plant is updated only when you add a new Node to it.
Post Quality
News alert! People want to look at pretty pictures!! So we're going to do our best to put high-quality photos in front of people.
Also unsurprisingly, we use likes to measure post quality. People tend to like beautiful photos, healthy plants, interesting species, and fun names and captions. If you bring a smile to someone's face, you'll get a like!
Nodes
Similar to post quality, we want our users to see beautiful timelapses that show the growth a plant has gone through.
In fact, the absolute best way to game our algorithm is to add a new Node to your plant. Adding a Nodes does three things that our algorithm likes: 1) it updates the plant to make it more recent; 2) people are able to like your plant another time increasing your total like count; and 3) the additional node boosts its ranking.
Framing each photo so that it best shows your plant's growth will result in the best timelapse. If your plant's stem is always in a different position in the photo, it will be hard to identify if there are any new leaves. Separately, if you're adding a Node every day and there isn't much difference between one photo and another, users will perceive it as being spammy, won't get very excited for the update, and will be less likely to like your plant. Add a new Node when there is great growth to show off!
Number of Props
Prōpa is a plant sharing app at its heart, so we want to show off plants by the people who share most prolifically. We weight heavily the number of props a plant has when ranking it in our search algorithm. This helps people find others who are the most generous with their plants, and makes it more likely that you see the parent plant of one of the props you've received through Prōpa.
In Conclusion
Our algorithm will continue to improve, but one thing will always be true: we want you to see good content of plants that people have propped. Take time to take great photos, and you'll find your plants at the top of our feed!