How does For You work?

The Stage has two main views: For You, which is put together for you, and Explore, which shows public work from across Stanza. This article explains how For You decides what to show.

What For You weighs

Every poem that could appear in your For You feed gets a score. Several signals feed into it:

• Interest: how closely a poem matches your taste. Stanza builds a picture of your taste from what you read and react to, plus any forms and styles you told us you like.
• Recency: newer work ranks higher, so the feed stays fresh.
• Relationship: poems from people you follow and interact with rank higher — and so, to a lesser degree, do poems from people that they follow.
• Engagement: how readers are responding to a poem through reactions and replies.
• Diversity: a balancing signal that stops one poet from filling your whole feed, so you keep meeting new voices.

Interest carries the most weight, followed by recency. No single signal decides on its own.

How it learns

For You learns from what you do, not only from what you explicitly react to. Opening a poem, spending time reading it, saving it and reacting to it all count as signals. The more you read, the better the feed fits you.

Shaping your feed

• Read and react honestly. Cheers and Encores tell the feed what moves you; scrolling past tells it something too.
• Follow poets you like. Following is one of the strongest signals.
• Adjust your Stage settings. Your Stage settings let you change what appears in your feed.
• Switch to Explore when you want to wander outside your usual taste.

Why does my feed look different from a friend's?

Because it is built for you. Two readers who follow different people and read different poems will see different For You feeds — that is by design.