Updates to Ranking Algorithms and Fighting Spam

We’ve been making changes to our recommendation system to show you more engaging content. See what’s changed and what's next in this post.

Dec 16, 2024

We want our room recommendation systems to meet the needs of both players and creators.

For players, we want you to see fresh, engaging and high-quality rooms.

For creators, we want to make sure that new high-quality content has a shot at getting discovered and becoming popular.

Over the past few months, our primary focus has been that first point– tweaking our recommendation system to show players more high quality content. We altered our algorithms to focus heavily on “known good” rooms. These rooms are engaging to a broad portion of the player base over the course of hundreds of thousands of visits and avoid low-effort or spammy tactics. While this approach increased the quality of the average room seen by players, it inadvertently made it much harder for new content (essentially “unknown good” rooms) to get enough visits to break into the top rooms.We heard this complaint from many creators: “It’s hard to get my room discovered.”
Since then, we made further adjustments to the recommendation systems, allowing new rooms to have a significantly better chance of rocketing to the top of the recommended rooms. Konfront, BlitzBoxer, and Court are examples of rooms that benefited from these recent changes. They were able to get into the top charts much faster than they would have been able to in the past. And our players have been loving them.In the chart below you can see that more newly published rooms are getting over 100 visits shortly after being published, a key milestone for getting our algorithms enough information to evaluate a room’s performance and whether we should show it to even more players.

However, when we pushed some of these changes, it became too easy for some spam content to get a boost as well. We definitely don’t want this. We’re actively working to fix that unintended consequence with additional tweaks to our ranking system and taking action in accordance with our 3-strike policy on creators who are abusing our systems.There is an inherent tension between quality and stasis in the top 100. If the top 100 is filled with great rooms, but those rooms never change, that is bad for everyone in our community– players and creators. Players are stuck playing in older rooms and great new content can’t get discovered, which sucks for our creators too. There is also a tension between making it easy to become discovered, and preventing spam. We’re trying to iteratively improve, but sometimes (as in this case) we can inadvertently over-correct.Below you can see how our changes to the recommendations affected the Top 100 rooms over time:

Right now, we are dialing in on striking that perfect balance– keeping it easy for new, great content to break through AND putting more work into improving our spam filters. We hear a lot of your feedback on the rooms you’d like to see, and we are committed to getting it right. Stay tuned– more is coming!