Ponder

Feed Feature

News-feed behavior, content ingestion, categories, personalization, and likes.

Purpose

The feed is the main For You reading surface. It loads a broad discover pool from content, personalizes ordering client-side, and lets the user tune, save, like, open, and verify articles.

Tables

Primary table: content

Relevant columns:

• title, body, body_text, summary
• category, subcategory, tags, language
• source, author, sourceUrl, imageUrl, publishedAt
• readTimeMinutes, confidenceScore, isFactChecked, isFeatured
• likeCount

Supporting tables:

• saved_items for saved state.
• content_likes for per-user likes.
• users for profile interests and persisted feed tuning.

Categories

The discover category list is defined in content_repository_support.dart and ContentCategory:

• news
• article
• opinion
• review
• discover
• business
• science
• technology
• health
• politics
• culture
• sports

ContentCategory.unknown exists in the Flutter model as a fallback but is not declared in the Appwrite enum.

Feed Query

FeedRepository.fetchDiscoverBatch queries content with:

• Query.equal('category', categories)
• Query.orderDesc('publishedAt')
• Query.limit(limit)
• Query.offset(offset)
• Query.isNotNull('title')

Rows map into ContentItem, then deduplicate by sourceUrl when present, otherwise by normalized title.

Personalization

feedPersonalizationSnapshotProvider builds a snapshot from:

• local onboarding interests
• local preferred topics
• local avoided topics
• profile interests
• saved-item categories and topics

ForYouNotifier uses this snapshot to:

• choose preferred query categories when available
• rerank the fetched batch with prioritizeItems
• explain why a story appears through the feed tuning sheet

Tuning

FeedTuningController handles:

• More like this
• Less like this

Local preferences are stored in shared_preferences. For signed-in users, backend sync writes:

• users.feedPreferences
• users.boostedTags
• users.suppressedTags
• users.interests when profile interests are adjusted

The feed refreshes the off-screen tail after tuning, keeping the current story in place.

Likes

Feed cards use LikeService:

• isLiked(contentId) checks content_likes.
• setLiked(contentId, liked: true) creates a content_likes row, then runs like_sync with increment.
• setLiked(contentId, liked: false) deletes the like row, then runs like_sync with decrement.
• getLikeCount(contentId) reads content.likeCount.

The UI supports double-tap heart animation and signed-out like gating.

news_refresh Function

news_refresh fetches NewsAPI and Guardian content, normalizes it, quality-filters it, deduplicates by URL, skips existing content with matching sourceUrl, and inserts rows into content.

Inserted rows include:

• normalized title and body
• body_text
• source metadata
• category/subcategory
• language
• read time
• image/source URLs
• isFactChecked: false
• isFeatured: false
• tags: []

UI

ForYouScreen is a one-item-at-a-time vertical feed. It uses a controlled PageView, keyboard and wheel navigation, touch swipe detection, pull-to-refresh on the first item, search shortcut, save button, like button, and tuning bottom sheets.