Watched Words — and Why They Don’t Change the Score

It is the feature allowing you to define the words you want to track, so you can see the news containing these words colorfully or prominently in the feed.

Watched words are a visual marker and increase permanence (exempting the item from archive cleanup); however, they do not grant your device the authority to change the score of that news directly. If a specific word you chose added points to the news, you would have created an artificial echo chamber with your own hands. For this reason, the score bonus belongs only to the trending words detected by the system.

Example: When you watch the word ‘space’, the news containing this word being underlined in the feed but not jumping to the very top.

Go deeper

The point where readers fall into fallacy the most is the belief that the topics they are interested in should have a high score. However, according to MagPunk’s philosophy, the objective information value of a news item does not change based on your area of interest. You can track up to 5 words in the system (in the free version). While watched words do not affect the score, trending words determined by the device naturally get included in the score with +7, +4, +2 points respectively based on the word’s age (e.g. <6 hours, 6-12 hours, ≥12 hours). Visualize your interests, but do not allow them to interfere with the system’s value judgments.