I am looking into building a social network app (many similar functions as FB/LinkedIn/Insta/...)
In order to make the feed experience good, I want to show the user mostly posts that they have not seen before.
What's a good way to estimate if a user has likely seen a particular post in their feed?
My naive method would be to assume that everything the backend has sent to a user was seen. But this has some pitfalls:
- The feed acts as the landing page for the site, so this would work poorly in situations where a user just goes to the feed to go somewhere else (i.e. maybe visits the feed only for half a second)
- The loaded content can be longer than the user's screen. So they may not have read all of it.
What would be the best way to improve from here? Should I build some JS script that tries to track what is visible to the user at any given time, and try to time how long they spend at that particular part? Or is there a better method (or even ready tools)?