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Discussion on: In Case You Missed It: The Most Popular Posts from the Past Week (April 24 - April 30, 2017)

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Tariq Ali

How do you decide what content to highlight? Do you use Google Analytics to rank the popularity of articles of that week and choose the articles that received the most hits and views? Could this same process also be used for comments (you already have the "like" functionality built in to get feedback about the popularity of certain comments)?

Essentially, I would like to know if you can automate the generation of ICYMI blog posts. I doubt you can fully automate away everything (you probably have to manually pick the pictures and write out the short summaries), but automating away a lot of the work could help to make ICYMIs more sustainable.

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Walker Harrison

It's a good question -- we're a bit liberal with the term "Most Popular" ... I think there's both science and art to these roundups. Sure we could just pick the top 10 articles from last week from a pageview count perspective, but that doesn't allow us to correct for diversity in thought and content. So we'll likely start with an extended list of the most viewed articles from last week and make adjustments that we see fit. Plus we can't yet automate the selection of 🔥 gifs