How ranking works
The For You feed gathers candidates, scores them against your settings and your history, then damps repetition before showing you the result.
Ranking runs in three stages. Nothing in it is secret, and every weight below is the number the app actually uses.
1. Candidates
Three pools are gathered for each refresh:
- 1,500 posts by weighted popularity.
- 400 posts nearest your interests, found by vector search over what posts are about.
- 300 posts from accounts whose taste resembles yours.
Accounts you follow are pinned into the candidate set and are never cut by the cap. Following someone is a hard guarantee of eligibility, not a hint.
2. Scoring
27 named signals feed the score. Engagement signals are weighted by how much work the action takes, so a reply counts for far more than a like. Explicit feedback outweighs all of it.
| Signal | Weight |
|---|---|
| Show more | +15 |
| Share | +13 |
| Bookmark | +10 |
| Reply | +7 |
| Repost | +5 |
| Quote | +5 |
| Like | +0.5 |
| Show less | −20 |
| Not interested | −50 |
The rest are behavioural: how long you dwell, whether you scrolled back to something, whether you finished a video, whether you expanded the replies. The full table is at Ranking signals.
3. Damping
Past the third post from one author, the rest are damped, and so is any single format that starts to take over the slate. This is what stops one prolific account or one video run from becoming the whole feed.
Where your settings enter
Your sliders and rules are part of the same formula, not a filter bolted on after it. A setting you make by hand also overrides what the system learned about you: manual beats inferred, always. Hard filters, meaning blocks, mutes, network scope and not-interested, are applied as filters rather than weights, so nothing can outbid them.