[1236] Trending/Hot Section is hurting ambitious Worlds
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Maebbie
The "Trending" sorting of the World menu is favouring older worlds over new worlds that drive innovation and have a more fickle playercount due to it.
Currently the Trending/Hot algorithm does not take into account when your world has been uploaded. This is a problem, because it means newer worlds have no way of ever being given a chance. People tend to move where people are, so it matters little what kind of world you have as long as it has a lot of players in it. Therefore as a new ambitious creator your only chance is to make use of your initial push of curious explores to grow a playerbase.
This is not possible with the current algorithm, because it is hard for a new world to get among the top worlds on Trending. Which is what most people will see on the new Trending page, as it opens by default when you first open the World menu. And since you only see "trending" worlds as you scroll down on the new UI this makes it even worse.
Please take into account how most people will use your UI, I do like the other features you have added to improve discoverability, however the algorithm that determines how things are ranked in Trending will overall make discoverability even worse.
The Solution to this would be to give newer worlds more weight on its ability to rank up on the Trending page. Aka your heat level.
It should be structured in a way where worlds that got out of labs a while ago (lets say 1 year old ones) are virtually unable to rank high on the Trending page. On the other hand new worlds with less players (but still having people in it ofc) should be given a boost. That way a new innovation/concept can be given a chance for a short time while it is still fresh to see if it is fit for the test of time.
Think of this time based weight as an Exponential Regression Curve whose weight goes to 0 after 1 year.
Please also note that resetting the Heat Level every 2 weeks is not an adequate measure, since the level will bump itself up within literal hours if you got people already in it when it happens.
It can not be that you have to employ some jaded marketing strategies to get your world seen. I am telling you this from experience as Mr. HomeBox. I benefit from the current algorithm btw and made a documentary on how exactly 2 years ago, that may have found its way to you a while back.
As it stands now you have 18 out of the top 20 worlds on Trending be over a year old. By adjusting the algorithm with a time component you will not only keep the game fresh, but also encourage creators to give it their all, as they too now have the ability to be seen on the illustrious front page of VRChat.
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Strasz - Community Team
We currently aren't happy with the results that are being displayed in the Trending section. While we aren't ready to quite share how we'll be adjusting things, we are looking into tweaking things so that the results are a little more dynamic.
When we have more details on what this means, we'll share them.
rollthered
Strasz - Community Team: Was this related to VRCat's Variety Box in the post from here https://hello.vrchat.com/blog/main-menu-update-live ? Or is the team still exploring further ways to make new creators able to get their worlds more traction? I would love to see this thread continue to be ongoing as the team implements new features to mitigate the steep curve of getting a world traction!
Lucifer MStar
I personally think the new way of discovering world is awful and should not have been passed. The new search features are great but in the end the discoverability for new worlds has drastically dropped.
Before you could see multiple rows at once now you have to click a lot and I mean a lot of buttons.
Maebbie
Lucifer MStar: Trending ensuring that newer worlds receive more weight in their ranking would lead to the same result as the old menu with multiple rows did. That is allowing the casual user to discover newer worlds of high quality with ease.
In fact I think this algo change would be even better than relying on multiple rows, since only the top 4 worlds in each row really benefited from this old UI system in the first place. Compared to 20+ worlds of any category showing up together now by default. But as said it needs an algo change for Trending to really make this a success for users and ambitious creators.
Lhun
Lucifer MStar: This is actually super cool coming from someone who enjoys insanely popular worlds that often make the persistant hot lists.
There are no doubt worlds that really need to be up there more, absolute "magnum opus" level worlds that are barely seen unless they're submitted to venice or raindance, or get featured by vrchat or get press like fionna, kent, etc.
Scout - VRChat Head of Quality Assurance
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ETHEYtheDREAMER
It seems like a win-win to me. Allow Pug/Black Cat/etc to remain high traffic and popular while simultaneously making sure more new worlds have a chance in the spotlight.
ni1chigo2115
It would be nice to have a list of standard worlds that are separate from the classics, such as the traditional HOT and TREND combined.
Rather, it would be better to merge or change the specifications of HOT/Trend to a new algorithm like Topic, while moving the ones similar to the current HOT/Trend to a new section.
Blue-kun
Maybe the weighting of 'visitor's could be removed - I think a huge portion of the most popular worlds are visitors who are new to the game and are simply joining the most popular world and don't know any better - not the best way to judge if a world is one that people genuinely want to hang out in (time and time again) or otherwise
Juzo~
Something that might be helpful is a way to curate a world list based on your friendslist. Such as recently favorited worlds by your friends, most favorited worlds by friends etc.
The popular tag being combined with the Trending tab is problematic I feel as well. There should be a differentiation like you spoke of. Popular will always be there. So having a different tab for Trending would be really helpful.
Maebbie
Juzo~: Trending should be the main one, just needs to have a time based component. And there already is a Popular section called "Active"
Sotalo
I think there should be a distinction between "Popular" and "Trending." Old worlds are "Popular/Hot," but they're not "trendy" in the slightest. They've been around forever, there's nothing new or exciting happening about them, and everyone already knows and appreciates them.
Since there's already a category for newly uploaded worlds, a new category for "Trending" should look at sudden uptick of visitors, comparing visits today from yesterday and the last 7 days vs. the 7 days prior. A sudden spike in visitors between yesterday and today could indicate a trend that's just starting, and a sudden spike week over week could indicate something trending more significantly.
The exact numbers would need to be tweaked, but the methodology would be interesting. Favoring spikes more than total users can help people find new maps that maybe some people found interesting, shared with their friendship circles, and it's starting to catch on. A relatively unknown map that suddenly sees a spike of 100 visitors per day should really catch people's attention over persistent, well-known maps with 3000+ users. That's not what's trending, that's just a world everyone knows and goes to.
Maebbie
Sotalo: Thanks for your input, I put a rough algo in another reply here how i envision it, which would just exponentially decrease the effect your heat level has on your ability to rank up in Trending. Your proposal is great as well though.
There already is a "Popular" section called "Active on PC/Quest".
Sotalo
Maebbie: I just don't want "trending" to become another "new." We already have a category for "new" and "hot," but we don't have a category showing genuine spikes in relative viewership: what indicates actual trends.
Say a popular world makes a big change and everyone's checking it out. That should definitely be in trending! Right next to an up-and-coming world that suddenly got a spike in relative visits. Some things take time to build an audience, too, and those worlds shouldn't be left out.
Maebbie
Sotalo: New is just worlds that got out of labs and getting out of labs is trivial. Trending should be newer worlds that have been visited by a lot of people and are very active. The algo would pretty much be to check how active a world is (they already do this for their heat level on a world) and then adjusting where you rank based on how new your world is.
So think of it like (activity level) * (how new is your world, new = 1 1 year old = 0). Just some example numbers btw.
I dont know about including updated worlds to it, maybe if there has not been an update in a few months they could make it where you get some of your weight back to be ranked among trending again.
Sotalo
Maebbie: The whole point of "trending" is to find what's recently catching on, worlds that suddenly see a spike in viewership. This would make discovery a breeze, and ensure a steady shuffle. But simply weighing worlds by age and popularity may not shuffle much, and you'll end up with the same problem: a lot of worlds that show persistently week after week without much change simply because they are both new and popular. And if you make the algorithm too strong to kick worlds out as they age, you'll end up shuffling a bunch of low-quality new worlds that just happen to be marginally more popular than others. The only way to know which method works better is to try both and find out. But you have to think, mathematically, the pros and cons, here, so the end result actually works the way you're hoping.
Maebbie
Sotalo: It would need a content drought for low quality new worlds to end up in Trending with something like this. There is no way that there have not been enough high quality worlds published recently to fill or supplement this time based algorithm. And if that really were to happen you can adjust the time factor to be more stretched out, like 2 years to 0 instead of 1 year to 0.
Additionally should a stray world end up in Trending by somehow getting tons of visit it would taper off rather quickly as people realize the quality has been low and by having other new worlds show up as alternative.
DrBlackRat
Well the Trending Category is there to see worlds with a lot of people in / are popular. This category definitely has it's right to exist so people can easily find worlds with a lot of other players.
If someone wants to do some world hopping they can just switch to one of the other categories. And I don't see how that is a big problem.
Premium²
Agreed, there needs to be something done to encourage a bit of churn on the front page. There is also a lot of duplication, I feel like several of the front page categories are just the same worlds.
In addition to your changes, limiting how many front page categories a world can appear in would be nice to see. Some of the front page worlds are very nice... but I don't need to see them in 5 different categories.
I feel like this needs to be part of a larger, ground up change to better allow visibility into worlds. Seeing more worlds per page is nice, but what about some of the fundemental issues with labs? I am bias because I have a world pushing 40k visits and 1,500 favs is labs, but man, something ain't right there.
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