Scoring Algorithm
How does Zirkels decide which content gets seen most? Our article scoring algorithm is totally based on how your audience engages with the article.
Last updated
How does Zirkels decide which content gets seen most? Our article scoring algorithm is totally based on how your audience engages with the article.
Last updated
Our mission here at Zirkels is to provide a system that allows writers like you to earn a sustainable, recurring income thanks to the awesome content you create.
To do this we are focused on helping you cultivate a tribe of enthusiastic followers who will regularly click that amazing reward button, because they truly appreciate what you do.
And one of the first, critical pieces to making this dream come true is making sure that awesome content floats to the top, while crappy content gets sucked into the deep, dark drainage tunnels far below Zirkel’s sleek surface.
That’s the mission of our article scoring algorithm.
You see, because Zirkels doesn’t have advertising, we are not motivated to attract cheap clicks. Our goal is not to get eyeballs staring at ads. Instead, we want to attract readers who truly care and appreciate what you produce.
In a nutshell, Zirkels anonymously tracks every view, like, reward, comment or share related to your article and records a record in our Engagement log. Each type of engagement has a value assigned to it which affects the total score of your article.
Each new article starts with a score of 1,000 points, and then accumulates points as people on the site engage with it.
Here is a list of the types of engagement that the article scoring algorithm is currently using:
View (by an anonymous user not logged in) - 2 points
View (by a logged in user) - 4 points
Like - 2 points
External share - 25 points
Comment - 50 points
Requote - 100 points
Repost - 75 points
Reward - 200 points
You see, we didn’t think it would be fair for articles to “climb the mountain” and then stay there forever denying new content its moment of glory. In order to maintain its position, an article has to continue to get engagement.
Why?
Because we have also implemented a daily decay function.
That means that every day, any article that has not received any engagement over the past day will see its score go down by 50 points. This happens every day until an article falls to 400 points at which point it stops dropping?
When you go in to your Zirkels dashboard you can clearly see the current score for each of your articles.
Is this a perfect system? Certainly not.
Will we be working to improve it? You bet.
Currently on our roadmap we are working on ways to actually score the content based on factors like originality, grammatical correctness, etc. We’ll also be looking to incorporate new types of engagements and to refine the points system I’ve outlined above. We are also working to incorporate and score engagements that happen outside of Zirkels through other Deso nodes.
And finally, because we believe in transparency, as we make changes we’ll keep all of you informed.
