Stories vs. broadcast: why we didn't build a public feed

The fork you can't unpick later

Every social network sits somewhere between two poles. On one end sits broadcast, where the goal is reach — the largest possible number of eyes on your post, ranked by an algorithm that maximises engagement. On the other sits narrowcast, where the goal is presence — a chronological catch-up with the people you actually know, ordered by time, not by predicted attention.

The choice between them is architectural. You can't unpick it later. Every downstream feature — how ranking works, how notifications trigger, how comments moderate, how the app handles a moment of virality — is downstream of that one choice.

Seldeo picked narrowcast. This is the story of that pick.

What the broadcast feed optimises for

Broadcast is not a moral failing. It is what people say they want when they're deciding what to open, and it's what the data of "which app kept your attention for longest" measures. It also has predictable side effects:

Ranking rewards the highest-signal posters. Anyone in your follow graph who consistently gets reactions from strangers rises to the top of your feed, regardless of whether they matter to you.
The important posts from small posters disappear. Someone in your close family posting a rare, small message gets ranked below a stranger's high-engagement post because the algorithm's signal on the stranger is stronger.
The experience rewards the loudest voices. Every design choice — from comment ranking to notification prioritisation — bends toward whoever produces the most engagement per unit of time.

Those aren't hidden problems that the big networks are trying to solve. They're the direct consequence of the choice to maximise attention across a broadcast graph.

What narrowcast optimises for

Narrowcast is different. On Seldeo:

You see everyone you follow, in the order it was posted. If your close friend from 2003 posts once a year, you see that post. If they post today, it is above the stuff your chatty college roommate posted yesterday, because it is fresher.
Ranking is minimal. There is a small "quiet ranker" that batches together sequential low-engagement posts from a single account into a single card, so a friend on a vacation-photo streak doesn't drown out the rest of your feed. That's it.
"Caught up" is a first-class state. When you've reached the end of the fresh material in your feed, the app tells you clearly. It does not autoplay related content. It does not suggest strangers.

The user experience this creates:

You open the app, catch up, and close it. Median session length on Seldeo, according to our first-month internal analytics, is 3 minutes 40 seconds. This is a feature.
Sessions per day are lower than a broadcast app. People open Seldeo a couple of times a day, not seven or eight. Also a feature.
The people you actually want to hear from show up. The small poster is visible, because the small poster is not being outranked by the loud poster.

Stories as the ephemeral layer

Stories are the concession to the "sometimes I just want to share the vibe" instinct that broadcast networks captured well in the 2010s. On Seldeo they are:

Attached to an audience choice from the composer. Public stories, friends-only stories, and Circle-scoped stories all work the same way; only the audience differs.
Chronological. In the story tray at the top of the feed, stories are ordered by post time, not by predicted engagement, and once you've viewed a story it moves to the back of the tray until it's replaced by a newer one.
Ephemeral. Stories vanish after 24 hours. Their metrics vanish at the same time.
Not automatically stitched together. We do not create "your year in stories" retrospectives. The stories the storyteller published are the stories the audience sees.

What we give up

Choosing narrowcast is expensive. Some of the costs are:

Virality is limited. A Seldeo post that resonates with a friend graph doesn't jump into a stranger's feed. The "someone discovered our small business through this post" event that broadcast networks are famously good at happens on Seldeo only through the Public audience, which most people don't use for most posts.
Follower counts are less meaningful. Follower count is more of a diagnostic than a badge. We don't display it prominently on profiles.
Discovery is more work. Finding new people on Seldeo looks more like search + friend-of-friend introduction and less like an infinite recommendation stream.

Those costs are conscious. We think the product Seldeo is trying to be — a calmer place for the people who actually matter — is worth them.

Where advertising fits

The single biggest tension in a narrowcast product is monetisation. Ad networks are built for broadcast. They assume a high-volume feed of engagement-optimised content into which sponsored posts blend seamlessly.

On Seldeo, advertising sits in a small number of clearly labeled positions:

In-stream video ads before the video posts your friends share, when those posts are longer than 60 seconds.
Native feed cards at fixed positions in the friend feed, six per 21-post scroll segment, each labelled "Sponsored" and each showing the AdChoices control.
Story ad slides between story bundles, no more than once every eight stories, and shaped like organic slides with the same Sponsored label.

We do not target the ranker to serve sponsored content higher. We do not blend organic and sponsored posts in the comment threads. And we don't monetise the notification channel with promotional content — a personal boundary we haven't been asked to cross yet, but that we want to state explicitly here because it will matter later.

Full details of the advertising architecture are in the Privacy Policy and, once we ship, the specific mechanics will be in the help center.

What we've learned so far

Narrowcast is easier to describe than to build. The friction we hit most often is the "I opened the app and nothing happened" experience of a user whose friend graph is thin. Broadcast networks fill the empty space with strangers' content. Narrowcast networks have to give the user something to do.

Our answer: make it easy to bring the people you love with you. The most polished part of the onboarding flow is not the sign-up form; it is the friend-invitation flow that follows. Get five friends into the app and it is a real place. Get zero friends and it is a landing page.

We're still learning what the right shape of that flow is, and we'll write about it here as we do.

The line we don't cross

Seldeo will not become a broadcast network. Every product decision we make is calibrated against that constraint. If we ever quietly change our position, product@seldeo.com is the address where you should hold us accountable.