The For You (personalized) and Trending tabs ranked strictly by tier/score and
view count, which stacked a creator's whole back-catalogue into one block.
Add spreadAuthors() to the feed sorters: a gentle diversity re-rank that keeps
the caller's ranked order as the priority but avoids runs of the same author —
at each step it takes the highest-ranked remaining item whose author wasn't
among the last `window` picks (default 1), falling back to the plain top item
when every remaining candidate is a recent author. The #1 ranked item is always
chosen first, so "best-fit"/"most-viewed" stays topmost, and each author's items
keep their relative ranked order.
Applied to createForYouScoreSorter (personalized branch) and createTrendingSorter
(live items). Unlike interleaveByAuthor (full round-robin, used only for For
You's no-signal fallback + Explore), this preserves ranking rather than
flattening it, so each tab keeps its unique ordering process — just de-clustered.
Recent (chronological) and Explore (already diversified) are unchanged.
Tests: tests/feed-engine/spread-authors.test.mjs (7 — top preserved, no
avoidable adjacent dupes, per-author order kept, single-author/short/anon edge
cases, window:2 spread).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <[email protected]>
Explore shared the full active set with Recent/For You and leaned on freshness,
so it read like a reshuffled Recently-added. Give it a discovery identity:
- Weights: drop freshness (0.25 -> 0.12) and bump novelty (0.30 -> 0.35) so
recency stops dominating and topic-novelty leads.
- Add a soft followed-author penalty (weight 0.3): the scorer now reads
subscriptionAuthors from the Explore runtime and deprioritizes creators you
already follow, so non-followed creators surface ("new to you"). A penalty,
not a filter, so the feed stays full if you follow lots of people.
- More variety: lower the diversity sorter's MMR lambda (0.7 -> 0.5).
Also compacted For You's subscriptionAuthors reader to a one-liner to stay
under feedCoordinator's size cap while adding the same reader to Explore.
Tests: explore follows-penalty scoring; existing explore-scorer/diversity +
feedCoordinator suites green.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <[email protected]>
