An in-depth look at topics; our privacy-friendly approach to providing a good experience.
The issue with modern social media is that privacy is no longer a guaranteed right. All big platforms call themselves privacy friendly as they do everything they can to secure your privacy. That just means that they already collected so much sensitive information about you, that they need to secure it at all cost. Because when an actual bad party gets their hands on what the social media stores about you, you are in big trouble.
But being observed by your favourite platforms and applications is not necessarily bad. It is because of your highly specific digital profile of you, that we can endlessly scroll through actual enjoyable content. If no artificial intelligence or extensive algorithm was watching your actions behind the scenes, the content you get would be random and not correlate with your interests at all, however, be it at the cost of your privacy.
Since providing a fun and privacy-friendly experience is our primary goal we had to do things differently. We simply just cannot store insane amounts of information about you as that would go in against half our privacy policy.
And thus we made the hashtag a primary key to reaching interested people as a post creator or seeing interesting posts as a user.
When creating a post, everyone is motivated to put in one or two Topics. A topic is an identifier that is used around the platform to share your interests. As a user, you get to pick your topics which will show all posts which also got the same topic applied upon creation. Why? Because in doing so you chose yourself what you want to see. Those creating a post get the power to choose who gets to see their amazing creations.
At any time you can choose a set of topics that will show up on your home page. You have access to all topics, don't worry, but the ease of having them right there when logging in is of course very appreciated. Picking your topics right will lead to more engagement with your interests.
When creating a post you will be prompted to provide one or more topics. This is to quickly inform you why you should take this opportunity and make the best of it. If you pick a topic that is well associated with your post you will automatically reach interested people. These tend to be very thankful for content that is suiting their interests. Picking the right topics gains you more reach to people that would love to see more of that! It is quite literally a way of getting a better engagement rate with your content. People tend to check your profile more when you post accurately under topics.