Possible VKontakte friends. Recommended VKontakte news What is VK new recommendations

Good afternoon everyone. In the last article, we discussed in detail. Today we will talk about ribbon management, namely what is recommended entries, and how the VK recommendation feed is formed.

In previous articles, we have analyzed the news menu and its capabilities. There is another menu item called “Recommendations”. What is it for? Those users who have been around for a long time have many friends, and they are subscribed to various groups and public pages. Every day something new happens in the life of a social network, and everyone and the communities in which you are a member create and post new information for everyone to see. As a result, so many posts appear in the feed that the user is unable to not only “digest”, but sometimes even read them. It is for this that the creators of the site have come up with a special algorithm that calculates the most interesting and relevant news for you.

If we go to this section, then not all entries in a row will be displayed here, but only those that are selected specifically for you.

How does the VKontakte website offer us interesting news? Here is a complex algorithm that analyzes who your friends and subscribers are, whose pages you most often view and comment on, as well as who you like and whose or in your community. Based on this analysis, your preferences and interests are calculated, and exactly those posts that are most interesting to you are offered. Most often, VK guesses with advice and gives out the most interesting and relevant for you ahead.

It often happens that you subscribe to communities, but then they become uninteresting to you, and you don’t even go there to read the new posts of the group. Gradually, there are more such communities and people on your list, and your feed is littered with unnecessary information. Recommended news helps you save time and find the most interesting information.

• it is not interesting;
• notify about entries;
• complain.

1. How remove recommendations certain friends or communities? If you select the first item, then a window with suggested settings will appear in place of the post. Here you can report the entry, undo the action, or select “Do not show community/user news” by clicking on the appropriate button.

If you select this action, posts from the group or user will no longer appear in the recommendation feed. After clicking the button, you will see the following message:

If you change your mind, you can still click "Undo". After closing or refreshing the page, it will be impossible to cancel the operation!

It may be that you frankly did not like the post. For example, it may contain an insult, a call for aggression or violence, and other reasons. Then you can “snitch” on the record of the social network administration by clicking the “Complain” button in this section. After that, you can select the reason for the complaint from the drop-down list.

2. Now let's look at the second item of the drop-down menu - “ Notify me of entries“. If you select it, then all news from the selected groups or users will be displayed in the recommendation feed, and you will also receive notifications if this community or person publishes a new entry.

For example, we set “Notify about posts” in the settings for the community “Nizhny Novgorod” and for the user “Valery Nikiforova”. Now we will receive a personal notification when the selected community and user add a new .

If suddenly you are tired of receiving notifications, then you need to do the following:

• go to the notification section (bell icon at the top of the page);
• then select an entry and move the cursor over the arrow to the right of it. Then select the drop-down item “Hide notification”;
• after that, an inscription will appear in place of the notification that the message is hidden. Under it, click on “Do not receive notifications from”. Everything, now the site will not notify you of the news this community or user.

3. The third item of the drop-down menu - "Complain". We have already said that if a post violates applicable law or distributes prohibited content, you can report this to the social network administration in a couple of clicks. To do this, in the drop-down menu, select the item of the same name:

You will then be prompted to select the reason for the complaint from the list. Select and send.

What happens next is none of our business. The administration of the social network itself will assess the harm and danger of the information and decide how to proceed with the offender. And for today we have everything. Now you know how to rid yourself of various informational garbage in the feed and watch only what is interesting for you. Do not forget to share the article with your friends and subscribers on social networks.

Despite the departure from the VKontakte company of its main ideologist and part-time founder, the employees of the corporation continue to do everything to make it comfortable for users of this popular social network to surf the expanses of the service, communicate with friends, watch videos and photos, and also listen to music - spend time in social networks VKontakte.

Actual photos

One of the tools that give users fast access to new information (in particular to photos) are current photos. Accordingly, many users are interested in the question: how to include actual photos of VKontakte? In this article, you will just find out the answer to it. What's more, get additional guidance on how to view new content on this social network.

What are they?

Actual photos is a VKontakte function that automatically provides the user with a selection of photos. This selection is compiled on the basis of those accounts with which he interacted: he visited pages, put likes or made reposts. It should be noted that the current photo feed does not include materials from groups and public communities.

It is displayed as a regular feed at the top of the screen in the "News" section, so finding out the answer to the question of how to view current VKontakte photos is quite simple - just open the materials of this feed and start scrolling. It should be noted that the tape cannot contain more than two hundred photographs.

How to include actual photos of VKontakte?

The fact is that the Actual Photos tool works according to a special algorithm. You can't turn them on by yourself. The system itself will issue a selection of relevant photos after the user has not been online for more than two hours.

Now you know how to include actual VKontakte photos.

Although in fact, many users do not like this timing idea at all. They would like to be able to choose when they want to view the current photo feed. And such a position has the right to life. It remains to be hoped that the developers will listen to the wishes of users and come up with new way view a feed of current photos.

The user himself can see the photos posted by his friends and publics, as well as the public communities to which he is subscribed. You can do this in the "News" section by going to the "Photos" subsection (you can find it at the top right of the feed). It is worth considering that the sources from which updates will come (photos in particular) can be controlled using filtering. This feature appeared in the VKontakte system for a long time.

Sources can be found on the right upper corner section "News" by clicking on the icon of a small trowel / flashlight / brush from a vacuum cleaner - everyone has different associations. It is next to the plus sign.

By the way, find out how to include relevant photos in the new VKontakte (meaning new design) is also very simple. This is also done automatically by the social network system itself, and the user does not need to do anything.

Outcome

Now you know how to include up-to-date VKontakte photos, as well as how to work with them on the new social network design, which, by the way, has been used by default for quite a long time, and hardly anyone has had time to get used to it.

Also thanks to this article, you learned how to interact with the sources of information for your content and with the feed of recommendations from your friends and public communities that you follow.

And to do all this is quite easy. After all, the interface of the social network is intuitive, and navigation difficulties are unlikely to arise.

They got a new design where there is no longer a side menu, new section with a feed of recommendations, and in the future the company is going to launch a platform for creating long reads within the social network. spent a day with the new application and talked with company representatives about how everything will work now.

On the web version of the social network, the news feed already had a “Recommendations” section, but its content was not synchronized with the search tab in the application, where the new algorithm works. In addition, the content in the tab is visually grouped: photos and videos are tiled, records with long texts take up more space and stand out.

About half of the entries you can immediately tell how they got into the recommendations - mainly because they were liked or commented on by friends. The other half gets in in an unknown way: the algorithm in the top recommendations showed me an unfunny (although kind of humorous) video of an unknown girl with 43 views and one like, not even from a friend.

The tape also contains many short text entries, sometimes there are publications of celebrities with verified profiles (I used Ruslan Sokolovsky and Ilya Varlamov). In general, the recommendations leave the impression of being a more consumable tool than the newsfeed or video section. Due to the removed interface elements that are not required in this case, the content has come forward and become more tidy. By clicking on the card, you can go to the entry itself - the entire familiar interface and a button for a quick subscription will be available there.

VKontakte calls its algorithm "Prometheus" (in ancient Greek myths, it brought fire to people): when a user's post gets into the recommendations, he gets a label in the form of a flame on his page. So it will be possible to understand where the flow of new comments and likes came from.

But not only Prometheus works in the recommendations feed, which is looking for something new and supports little-known bloggers. There are two more types of selected content: the first is personal recommendations based on the user's social graph, and the second is trends common to VKontakte.

Representatives of VKontakte said that Prometheus is able to search for users similar to others. If the social network knows that the artist Duran is popular with users, it will use the data collected about their interests to look for bloggers similar to him.

At the same time, the company promises that it will fight plagiarists who do not produce their own content, but earn popularity by stealing it from others. The algorithm will look for the original and try to show exactly it, and we are talking about all media - text, pictures and videos, explains Sergey Paranko, who develops the social network's media platform: “If someone took someone else's content and started to climb on it, then we will always check - and whether this content has been uploaded by someone before.

Cosmetics

In early September, the leading designer of VKontakte Pavel Knyazev announced an imminent redesign mobile applications. In the current form of the application, only half of what was promised has been implemented: the likes have become red (they look much juicier, it is more pleasant to press), the buttons have become more round, many icons have been redrawn and, most importantly, the application no longer has a side menu - there are only five buttons below.

Visually, this is unusual: the sections of the side menu are now under the fifth button, and music and video are also hidden there: when listening to music, you will have to return to this tab in order to switch tracks. The design of the audio player is still the same, and there are still no recommendations in the video section that appeared on the desktop back in 2015 - now all recommendations are only in the search tab.

The news feed is very reminiscent of a combination of Facebook and Instagram: on the one hand, there is a variety of “heavy” content, the delivery of which is controlled by an algorithm. On the other hand, stories and quick access to their creation by swiping to the right. But now VKontakte has not one, but two algorithmic feeds in adjacent tabs: news and recommendations.

It sounds difficult, especially since full synchronization with the desktop mobile version does not imply - neither in working methods, nor in visual design. Andrey Rogozov, managing director of VKontakte, explains: the web has long gone by the wayside, ahead - mobile platforms, and user patterns on them vary greatly.

Platform for longreads

So far, VKontakte has only the old possibilities for creating posts - writing text posts, taking photos, videos and stories with masks. But before the end of 2017, the social network promises to launch a platform for creating longreads that will be "correctly displayed on all devices."

Paranko explained that the platform for longreads is essentially an editor of long posts with various attachments, which will allow publishing complex formats within the social network. Previously, VKontakte publics used wiki markup for this, but it will most likely sink into the past - it will not be turned off, but will not be developed. According to the description, the platform will resemble what Medium, Facebook and Telegram already have.

Medium has a catalog of interesting articles, Facebook has a richer text layout tool, and Telegram has a primitive editor for publishing any large materials with support fast loading via InstantView. VKontakte says they will support the AMP initiative (this standard is used by Google and Twitter) for faster loading of their materials, including those embedded on external sites.

As conceived by the company, for the user reading external materials and published through the platform should be no different - moreover, the "smart" feed will rank such posts higher than regular links, as the content will load faster for the user. According to VKontakte statistics, 85% of users switched to the smart feed during the year of its operation.

How correct the display will be on all devices is still a question. A few years ago, as part of a similar initiative for media, VKontakte introduced large cards for links to media materials and other external sites - but the social network application for the iPad still does not know how to display them correctly.

Built-in messenger

Back in August 2014, representatives of VKontakte during a special event announced plans to release a separate messenger for messaging. These plans were repeatedly repeated by media sources until the end of 2016, until the question “When will VKontakte release the messenger” finally became a meme.

Informally, representatives of the social network have long recognized that the need for a separate messenger has disappeared. Now this is enshrined in the official press releases of the company: it began to separately count the audience of the “built-in messenger VKontakte” - according to the latest data, this is 82 million people a month. 97 million people use the social network every day.

The benefits of smart tape VKontakte

According to the official statement of representatives of the social network VKontakte, the majority of users switched to the smart feed on their own. Among users there are those who simply did not turn it off. Also, according to the above statistics, the coverage of records increased by more than 20% on average, and the number of targeted actions increased by 50%.

The old style tape is still available to users. As before, it includes publications from friends and subscriptions in chronological order. When creating a VKontakte account, smart feed is enabled by default. You can disable it in the "News" section by deactivating the "Interesting first" button.

The VK smart feed algorithm is of interest, first of all, to those users who are subscribed to a large number of groups and pages. Now they do not need to look through the entire chronology of publications in order to find the most interesting news and posts for themselves - just turn on the "Interesting first" button, and the algorithm will display the information that matches the user's interests. By the way, this fact is the reason why the ratio of "Like" marks has increased by 50% since the activation of the smart feed.

It is worth noting that the algorithm collects and analyzes the behavior of social network users all the time: it takes into account not only comments and “Like” marks, but also hundreds of other factors, most of which are not disclosed by the VKontakte administration. Notable ones include:

Since the interests of each person differ, the smart feed arranges content on an individual basis, and over time it improves thanks to a self-learning algorithm. In this regard, the owners of VKontakte groups and communities need to know how the smart VK feed works and how it can be used for maximum coverage. target audience and increase content loyalty.

How smart feed works VKontakte

For users of the social network, working with the algorithm is limited to pressing the on / off button of the smart tape. Owners and administrators of VKontakte groups, on the contrary, in order to popularize their resource and raise its rating, should ensure that the published content, whether it be photos, articles, audio or video recordings, gets into the ranking and is offered in the feed as the most interesting material.

The main thing that group administrators should know is how to prepare and arrange a publication so that it is suitable for getting into the smart VK feed. First of all, you need to pay attention to the content itself. In particular, it must be unique, that is, published for the first time, without any borrowing (even your own, previously published materials will be recognized by the algorithm as copied). It is not known to what extent the uniqueness of the content is taken into account, however, representatives of the network themselves state that original posts are shown much more often than repetitive material. Among the equally important conditions for the preparation of content are:

1. Publication format. Short and long materials are distinguished, with the presence of audio and video materials, photographs, links, documents, etc. The bottom line is that a person will be shown mainly what they most often pay attention to. For example, if it most often reacts to various selections of cat photos, similar material will always be in priority until the algorithm notices any changes and reacts to them; and vice versa, if a person prefers long posts, they will show up more often.
2. High visual quality of posts. Photos and pictures with poor resolution (less than 700px) are not ranked or ranked poorly in the smart feed. Also with video. This is done to ensure that the user in the feed is as aesthetically pleasing as possible.
3. Possibility to comment on records. Feedback users - a sign of interest. If comments are closed, the entry is much less likely to get featured. top positions ranking. If the administrator is concerned about the presence of obscene language and insults in the comments under the posts, they can be easily stopped using filters.
4. The number of entries per day. This is bad news for those who publish a large amount of material daily: infrequent, but high-quality posts are the priority of the smart feed. And vice versa, the more activity on the group wall, the less audience coverage will be in the end. The recommended frequency of posting posts is no more than one post within 3-4 hours.

In addition to complying with these conditions when compiling and publishing content, community administrators must carefully monitor and analyze statistics, observe user reactions to different types format of publications and build strategies in such a way that the proposed material satisfies not only the preferences of the audience, but also corresponds to the parameters of the algorithm. Together, this will lead to the fact that the news feed of each user will become more interesting and attractive, which means that VKontakte, firstly, will improve its position and will be able to attract much more business investment in advertising; secondly, it will force the authors to take the interests of subscribers more seriously.

How to get into the smart feed VKontakte

As noted above, a smart feed is an algorithm created specifically to form a more interesting news feed user. The hierarchy of posts here, unlike the standard chronological sequence, depends on the degree of usefulness of the published material and its ability to interest the user.

In addition, recommended posts sometimes appear in a person’s feed, which, according to the algorithm, may be of interest. This assumption is made, of course, on the basis of previously collected and analyzed data. At the same time, such posts can be published in a community to which a person is not subscribed. In other words, the algorithm generates a kind of personal search results within a social network. In this regard, the tasks of group administrators who want to get into the smart feed should be aimed at improving the quality of content:

• Firstly, the posts should be higher than the posts of other groups.
• Secondly, so that not only subscribers, but also random people interested in similar topics, can receive group posts as recommendations.

Combined, these actions benefit the community statistics by increasing the reach of views and subscribers.

The main factors for getting into the smart VK feed

Above, the factors that allow you to display group records in a smart feed were described. However, the fulfillment of these conditions does not give a 100% guarantee of success. The behavior of the target audience also plays an important role here. In particular, this includes the following options:

It is worth noting that these factors operate for a limited amount of time: the more user reactions a post collects within a day after publication, the more likely that it will be in the smart feed. In other words, a post that is a month old or even three days old, even if it suddenly starts to gain popularity, will not be able to qualify for ranking by the algorithm.

Among the typical posts that, according to statistics, most often come across in a smart feed, one can note posts with text and attached video material (one or more), text with a poll or vote, a selection of pictures and photos in high resolution etc.

Recently, VKontakte has the opportunity to write articles using an internal editor. According to popular belief, text-based content intended for long reading is prioritized in Smart Feed rankings. This assumption is due to the fact that large articles most often fall into the recommendations, increasing the natural increase not only in the reach of the target audience, but also in the subscribers of the group.

Smart Instagram feed

The introduction of smart feed in Instagram is due to the fact that the application was bought out by the largest social Facebook, where for many years he has been practicing ranking the news feed according to the degree of interest in posts from users. In other words, Instagram now only shows the content that gets the most engagement from the audience. As a result of the innovations, not only the ranking conditions have changed, but also the overall level of engagement of subscribers - for many popular accounts, the coverage has noticeably decreased.

The principle of creating a smart feed on Instagram is as follows: the algorithm, based on the individual characteristics of the user's account, selects the most interesting material. In particular, it takes into account: user activity (likes, comments), real geographic location, etc. Several users can be subscribed to the same profiles, however, the post display chronology will be different for each of them: for one person, the photo will be in priority and rank higher than another user.

When posting a photo on Instagram, the algorithm shows a small part of its followers (about 10-20%). If the response of the audience is high, the photo will move to even greater coverage and, having passed the "exam", moves on. Due to this, profiles with cheated subscribers (not showing activity) lose popularity and audience coverage.

The social network VKontakte unites people, and various algorithms are constantly being introduced into it, so that it is more convenient for users to find their friends, relatives and just acquaintances with whom they could see several times, but did not have time or did not want to add friends to each other when they met . One way to quickly replenish your list of friends with people you know is to use the VKontakte “Possible Friends” tool. In the framework of the article, we will consider the principle of action this algorithm and also how to use it.

How to see possible friends on VKontakte

To see users who social network VKontakte considers your potential friends, just go to the "Friends" section on your page. In the lower right corner of the page that opens, under the lists for filtering current friends, the block "Possible friends" will be located.

Each time you visit the page, it is formed in a new way. This block displays 5 people you may know. If you want to see more possible friends, click on the "Show all" button in this block.

After that, a page will open that displays all the users who are defined as possible friends for your page. Depending on how actively you use your VKontakte account, as well as on a number of other factors, the amount of user data may vary. Scroll down the page and new suggested friends will be loaded automatically.

Please note: Despite the fact that there are all kinds of filters on the top and right of this page, they in no way allow you to filter the list of possible friends. That is, if you use the search from above and, for example, try to find all possible friends with the name "Sergey", the social network will simply start looking for users with the name "Sergey" in its database, not focusing on the list of possible friends selected for you.

How are possible VKontakte friends determined?

The VKontakte company does not disclose the algorithms by which a list of possible friends is formed for each specific user. However, observations show that clearly the list of possible friends depends on:

It is important to note that the user does not have the opportunity to see who he is listed as a supposed friend for. That is, this information is not mutual for users. If you see that the VKontakte user is displayed as possible friend, for example, because you often visit his page, this does not mean that he will display you as a friend. Of course, with the exception of the situation when, when you visit a page, you show activity on it in the form of likes, reposts, comments, and so on.