Feed Gym

Lend a slice of your feed to Graze's public research on how feeds should be built, and add what's proven to work.

The Feed Gym is Graze's research on how feeds should be built, done in public on real feeds whose owners have chosen to take part. You lend a slice of every page of your feed. In that slice, Graze tests one idea at a time against the ordering you already use, and your readers' reactions decide which works better.

Taking part never changes the rest of your feed, and nothing that's learned is ever added to your feed unless you choose to add it.

Turning it on

You join the gym by adding a Gym Layer to your feed's Page:

Open your feed in the editor.
Click Page layers in the left sidebar.
Under Self-improvement, pick Gym Layer, then click the canvas.
Set its Share of every page, then press Save.

Having the Gym Layer on your saved feed is what turns the gym on. Removing it and saving turns the gym off. A feed can have one Gym Layer, and it has no parameters, thresholds or audience. See Page Layers and Audiences for how layers and shares work.

The layer's share is how much of your feed is experimental: that slice of every page, for every reader. The rest of the page is always your own layers. A bigger slice learns faster; a smaller one is gentler on your readers. At 100% the whole page is the gym's. Set the Gym Layer to 0% to pause it without removing it.

When nothing is being tested, the gym's slice simply follows your main layer, so your readers notice nothing.

Your feed's Gym page

Once your feed is taking part, a lightning-bolt Feed Gym button appears in the header of your feed's page. The Gym page has four parts:

The top line tells you how much you're lending, for example "You are lending 20% of every page to Graze's feed research." If your Gym Layer is at 0% it says nothing is being tested on this feed. Change this in the editor takes you to your feed.
Being tested now names the idea currently being tested and what your own readers have said about it, for example "Your readers preferred the tested layer in 12 of 20 visits, against 8 for your own ordering." A chart shows decisive visits per day, split between "preferred the tested layer" and "preferred your ordering". If nothing is running, it says your readers are seeing your own ordering throughout.
Worth adding to this feed lists results that readers clearly preferred, which you can add to your feed (see below). This section only appears when there's something to offer.
What your feed has helped settle lists finished tests your feed took part in, each with its outcome and what your readers contributed.

If your feed isn't taking part, the page explains how to add a Gym Layer and links to the public results.

How tests are judged

One test at a time. At any moment, the whole gym is testing a single idea (or nothing). Every feed taking part answers the same question, so evidence from many feeds can be pooled into one result.

Fair interleaving. In the gym's slice of a page, readers see posts from the layer being tested mixed in with what your feed would otherwise have shown. The two are woven together so that neither side gets the better positions.

Visits. A visit is one reader, on one feed, in one sitting. A visit is decisive when the reader engaged with one side more than the other. Most visits aren't decisive, because most people read without acting, and those don't count towards anything. Rarer actions count for more than common ones.

A fairness check. On about one gym page in ten, both halves come from the same ranking. If the method were favouring a position on the page rather than a better design, that check would drift away from an even split. Graze watches it in public.

How a test ends. A test ends when readers have clearly preferred one side, when any difference is too small to matter, or after three weeks. The possible outcomes are:

Readers preferred it: the tested layer won.
Readers preferred the feed's own ordering: it lost.
Too close to matter: no meaningful difference.
Not enough evidence in three weeks: any difference is smaller than the traffic could show.
Withdrawn before it could answer: the test was stopped early.

A result is only offered to feeds when readers preferred it clearly, and the win rate isn't published while a test is still running, so nobody is tempted to call it early.

Adding a proven result

Under Worth adding to this feed, each result shows how often readers preferred it and across how many feeds. You have two choices:

Add at 25% adds that layer to your feed straight away, at a quarter of the page. Your other layers are scaled down to make room and keep their proportions to each other. The change is live immediately; you don't need to publish.
No thanks hides the suggestion for now. It may appear again the next time you open the page.

Graze never adds a layer to your feed on its own. If a result was only shown by one other feed's readers, it can't be added yet: you'll see a message explaining that there's no evidence it would do the same for your feed, and it stays on the results page until another feed sees the same thing.

Public results

Every result, including the ones that found nothing, is published at graze.social/gym. The page shows how many feeds are taking part, what's being tested now and why, what has worked, everything tested so far, the fairness check, and how much each kind of engagement counts. It never names which feeds took part or shows any feed's own numbers.

Common questions

Will the gym change my feed's rules? No. The gym only changes the order of posts in its own slice of the page. Your Rules still decide which posts are in your feed.

Do my readers see anything different? Only within the gym's slice, and only while a test is running. The rest of every page is your own layers.

How do I leave? Remove the Gym Layer in the editor and press Save, or set it to 0% to pause.