Varun Srinivasan
@v
The active badge is going away. Spammy accounts are aggressively gaming the system to get the badge. Making the rules stricter just makes it harder for legitimate users. We’re past the point where a simple rule based system will work. We need something better.
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Varun Srinivasan
@v
Introducing the Power Badge, a new ranking system from Warpcast. It uses a PageRank-like approach to recursively find power users who are active and post content that the rest of the network finds interesting. Unlike the active badge, it does not have a set of rules that you can follow to earn the badge.
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Varun Srinivasan
@v
Power badges show up on user profile, just like the old active badges. They're intended to be a signal of quality to users browsing Warpcast, and to frame developers and other devs building in the ecosystem. Warpcast will make power badges available over an API.
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Varun Srinivasan
@v
At launch, the power badge will have many fewer false positives (spammy users with the badge) and a few more false negatives (good users without the badge). It’s at a point where its already better than active badge for most purposes, and we will continue iterating and improving it every week.
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Varun Srinivasan
@v
How do I get the power badge? Since it is network-based, there isn’t a guaranteed way to get it. The best approach is to: 1. Use the app weekly. 2. Cast things that other power users like, reply to or recast. 3. Avoid casting things that power users find spammy.
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Varun Srinivasan
@v
Will the algorithm be made public? No, for two reasons: 1. It becomes easier to game, as we’ve seen with the active badge. 2. It is going to change often as we dial in the parameters. We expect this first version to be directionally right but not perfect. It will take many iterations before we get this right.
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Varun Srinivasan
@v
We expect it to launch later this week. If you have any questions or feedback, we’d love to hear it now and factor it into our design.
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Elie
@elie
Very cool. Never understood why Twitter didn’t take an approach like this. If a power user marks something as spam it should quickly get taken down. Or if a handful do.
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