How your feed is ordered
"Why am I seeing this?" shouldn't require a leaked internal document to answer. This article describes how the Seldeo feed actually decides what to show you, in the order it decides it.
The short version: your people come first, newest first. Discovery fills in around them, never over them.
The five sources, in priority order
Each page of your feed is assembled from five sources, in a fixed order of precedence:
- Friends. New posts from your friends that you haven't seen yet, newest first.
- People you follow. New posts from accounts you follow, newest first.
- Lists that include you. Posts someone shared to a custom audience — a Circle or list — that you're part of, newest first.
- Creators you've added. Posts from creators you've chosen to see more from, beyond the people you follow.
- Trending. Broadly-shared public posts, ranked by current activity. This is the only source that uses a popularity score, and it only fills the space left after your own people's posts are placed.
Two properties fall out of this design:
- A friend's unremarkable Tuesday post always outranks a stranger's viral one.
- Posts from friends and followed accounts are ordered by recency, not engagement. We don't reshuffle your people's posts by predicted clicks.
What "trending" means here
For the trending source only, posts are scored by recent activity, adjusted for your affinity — creators whose posts you regularly engage with rank a bit higher, and creators you consistently skip rank lower. To keep any one account from flooding the section, a single page shows at most one trending post per creator.
Things people mistake for bugs
- Your own posts don't appear in your feed. By design. Your feed is for other people's posts; yours live on your profile. Right after posting you'll see your new post pinned at the top for that session so you can confirm it published.
- A post you already saw doesn't come back. Seen posts are deprioritized in the friend and following sources so the feed keeps moving forward.
- A quiet week looks quiet. If your friends and follows haven't posted, Seldeo does not paper over the gap with algorithmic filler at the top. The feed's job is to reflect your network, not to guarantee infinite novelty.
What the feed never does
- It never inserts posts because an advertiser or creator paid for reach into your feed's organic slots.
- It never reorders your friends' posts by predicted engagement.
- It never punishes you for closing the app.
For the philosophy behind these choices, the news post A quieter feed is the long-form version.