Transparency
How the timeline works
Debaty ranks your timeline with a handful of signals, all named below. No black box: every signal that moves your timeline is here — and you tune them yourself in your preferences.
Signals you tune yourself
You can make these heavier or lighter, or switch them off entirely. They are about who and what you chose.
People you follow
Posts from people you follow get more room. You choose who those are.
Your friends
When someone you are friends with (you follow each other) posts something, it counts.
Topics you follow
Follow a topic and posts about it come by more often.
Topics you take part in
Post about a topic yourself and you see more of it — you are clearly interested.
Signals without a knob
These belong to how the timeline works and are the same for everyone. You cannot pump them up or sell them — that is on purpose.
Quality of the conversation
Reactions like “well argued”, “reliable source” or “changed my mind” count. The cheapest button — a bare like — does not. You cannot pump this signal up.
How recent
Fresh posts come above old ones, so your timeline stays current. This is not a knob.
Live now
A liveblog that is happening right now gets a small nudge — it is happening now.
What we never do
- We do not measure how long you look at a post or how far you scroll.
- We do not sell your data or attention, and we do not trade spots in your timeline.
- We do not design for addiction: no endless prompts, no artificial scarcity.
Trending now — per language, checkable
‘Trending now’ shows which topics are surfacing right now in your language. The order isn’t a hidden score — it’s a simple count you can reproduce yourself.
- We look at the language of the posts themselves (detected automatically), not at who you are — so you see what’s alive in your language even when the author’s profile differs.
- A topic only counts as trending in a language once at least 3 different people post about it, so one busy account can’t lift anything on its own.
- If it’s still too quiet in your language, we show the Europe-wide picture instead. We never use your IP address or location to assign you a country.
Voluntarily transparent
Under the European Digital Services Act (art. 27), large platforms must explain how their recommender system works. For a platform our size that is not formally required — we do it anyway. That is exactly the point.